Deriving cooperative biomass resource transport supply strategies in meeting co-firing energy regulations: A case for peat and wood fibre in Ireland

Ger Devlin and Bruce Talbot

Applied Energy, 2014, vol. 113, issue C, 1700-1709

Abstract: The Irish government has undertaken to reduce national CO2 emissions through a range of measures put out in their Biomass Action Plan and the National Renewable Energy Action Plan. The conversion of peat fired power plants to co-fire with renewable biomass is one of these. This paper considers how the adoption of sweeping policies impact on other actors presently supplying or utilizing woody biomass resources. The SAWMILL sector (18 sawmills), BOARD sector, 3 board plants, and ENERGY sector (3 peat fired power stations) were included in a Linear Programming (LP) based transportation study. Specific transport costs between each residue producing sawmill and each board and energy plant were modeled and used in finding the minimum delivered cost for a number of scenarios. Scenario 2015 represented the status quo, while Scenario 2030 represented a situation with 30% co-firing with woody biomass equivalents in the energy plants. For each time horizon, the problem was solved from the perspective of society at large (GLOBAL), for the benefit of the board sector (BOARD) or with emphasis on minimizing the cost to the energy sector (ENERGY). The cost of transporting alternative sources of renewable energy was varied between €100 and €500TJ−1. Results showed how overall supply costs increase with increasing alternative energy cost, but also how the dynamics between sectors focus worked. The cost of transport to the Energy sector ranged from €306,043 to €996,842 in Scenario 2015, while the increased demand in 2030 led to a range of between €1,132,831 and €4,926,040, depending on the alternative cost selected. For the Board sector, whose absolute demand remained constant, the total transport cost ranged between €868,506 and €3,454,916 in Scenario 2015. The unchanged demand showed that the transport costs also remained the same for the 2030 Scenario, however, the optimization focusing on the Energy sector, increased the delivery cost to the Board sector by up to €693,730 per year by 2015 and €842,271 per year by 2030, indicating how intervention would be necessary if political ambitions of a 30% co-firing should happen without detriment to other important wood based industries.

Keywords: Co-firing; transport supply optimization; Linear programming; Biomass resource assessment; energy policy; Ireland (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261913007666
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:appene:v:113:y:2014:i:c:p:1700-1709

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/405891/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... 405891/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.apenergy.2013.09.019

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Energy is currently edited by J. Yan

More articles in Applied Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().