Technical and economical evaluation of combined cooling, heat and power technology: a brazilian study case considering different consumers

Abstract

The world is trying to move to a cleaner energy environment, especially on the electricity generation sector, which is responsible for a large share of CO2 emissions. In Brazil,crenewable energy sources are responsible for a great part of the electricity generation, but current changes in the Brazilian climate brought a necessity of diversification on the energy matrix. Then, distributed generation is a good way to diversify the Brazilian power matrix. Considering that cogeneration systems are distributed generation, and Brazilian buildings have need of cooling, due to the warm weather, the use of cogeneration equipped with an absorption or adsorption chiller could be beneficial. The trigeneration system is a highly efficient process, which can produce electricity, heating and cooling from the same primary energy source. However, there are really few researches concerning trigeneration systems in Brazil, especially on small and micro plants. Thus, this thesis will make and provide a technical and economical evaluation of small and micro trigeneration systems to different buildings under distinct tariff policies in Brazil. To do so, this work will optimize the sizing and monthly schedule the dispatch of the trigeneration systems to each one of the four study cases. Then, it will evaluate the maximum net present value (NPV) considering the variation of discount rate and US Dollar conversion rate. In the sequence, the grid dependence index (GDI), the discounted payback, the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) and the primary energy ratio (PER) to the best NPVs will be presented and analysed. As a result, this thesis will show that trigeneration plants can be profitable and can be certainly an efficient way to adopt a reliable and controllable distributed generation. Also, it will prove that it is possible to find situations in which the trigeneration plant can offer a high primary energy ratio, a fair levelized cost of energy, and in the meantime, it can provide financial savings with fair payback time in Brazilian buildings.