Technical and Economic Study of Powering Poultry Farm in Egypt Using PV-Biomass on-grid Energy Generation System: Case Study

Abstract

The main goal of this work is to find economical alternative energy supply solution for poultry industry in Egypt. By studying the economic feasibility of using hybrid renewable energy resources as main source of power for existing poultry farm in Egypt to reduce existing operational cost of energy and add resilience and reliability dimensions for the operation of poultry farm in rural locations. In addition to reducing the environmental impact of using poultry litter in its fundamental form. This hybrid system connected to grid is used in the company to avoid instability problem in which the company suffered when they applied biomass energy source as main power source to their farm in Lebanon. The grid will be used as energy storage during the excess energy production form the hybrid system and to add some resilience and reliability dimensions to the hybrid system to prevent instability to the farm ‘s grid due to the high penetration of renewable energy. The economic feasibility is evaluated of this configuration using HOMER versus different configurations and sizes for these systems including the existing situation of depending only on grid as main source of energy. The results showed that the best configuration is 400 kW biomass generator, and 500 kW PV plant will satisfy the average demanded load of 9660 kWh daily with using the grid as backup energy source. The cost of energy for this configuration will be 0.0894 $/kWh which is lower than continuing existing situation depending on the grid as main source of power in which its Cost of Energy (COE) will reach during the lifetime of the project to 0.184 $/kWh due to the increase in COE in Egypt by 8%.