Techno-economic assessment of providing control energy reserves with a biogas plant

Abstract

Grid stability is being challenged by the increasing integration of power plants with volatile power generation into the energy system. Power supply fluctuations must be compensated by energy system flexibility. The storability of the energy carrier enables biogas plants to generate power flexibly. In this study, the technical and economic effects of providing positive secondary control energy reserves with an Austrian biogas plant were assessed. The plant’s main focus lies in biomethane production with the option of heat and power generation through combined heat and power (CHP) units. A detailed simulation model of the investigated biogas plant was developed, which is presented in this work. Ex-post simulations of one year of flexible plant operation were conducted with this model. The findings show that the installed biogas storage capacity is sufficient to provide control energy reserves while simultaneously producing biomethane. Profitability of providing control energy reserves largely depends on the prices at the control energy market and on CHP unit start-up costs. A cost efficiency analysis demonstrated that investing in a hot water tank with a volume of 5 m³ for short-term heat storage turned out to be economically viable.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

biogas plant / process simulation / control energy reserves / economic assessment / gas storage

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Acknowledgements

This study was conducted over the course of the Bio(FLEX)Net project (project number D16621150400) that is supported by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG). Open access funding provided by TU Wien (TUW).Open Accessƒ This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

2018 The Author(s) 2018. This article is published with open access at link.springer.com and journal.hep.com.cn