[go: up one dir, main page]
IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ags/gjagec/303543.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Flexible Load of Existing Biogas Plants: A Viable Option to Reduce Environmental Externalities and to Provide Demand driven Electricity?

Author

Listed:
  • Schäfer, David
  • Britz, Wolfgang
  • Kuhn, Till
Abstract
The expansion of fluctuating renewable energies such as wind and solar increases the need for electricity produced on demand to stabilize the grid. Electricity from existing biogas plants in Germany allows flexible energy output and is increasingly marketed on demand requiring technical modifications such as increased gas storage and engine capacity. In this study we investigate an alternative approach in which a reduced fermenter load provides additional gas storage and engine capacity with no additional investment. This reduces input use and digestate production, thereby decreasing environmental externalities in regions with high biogas and animal densities. We quantify the required increase in subsidies for two dairy farms in Germany to switch from guaranteed subsidies for continuous electricity production to different levels of flexible load. The farms are assumed to have invested in a biogas plant under the Renewable Energy Sources Act of 2009 and 2012. We simulate the reduced biomass demand and its implications on farm management with a focus on fermenter input composition. Thereto, we develop a bio-economic model of a biogas plant and integrate it in the dynamic single-farm model FarmDyn. We find that provision of electricity on demand reduces especially the demand for maize silage, a feedstock with high negative environmental externalities. Even a moderate input reduction of 30% requires a subsidy increase of 1.8 to 3.2 cents/kWh contingent on the initial RES. We conclude that despite the approach being able to provide electricity on demand and to reduce negative environmental impacts, a widespread application seems unrealistic due to high additional subsidies.

Suggested Citation

  • Schäfer, David & Britz, Wolfgang & Kuhn, Till, 2017. "Flexible Load of Existing Biogas Plants: A Viable Option to Reduce Environmental Externalities and to Provide Demand driven Electricity?," German Journal of Agricultural Economics, Humboldt-Universitaet zu Berlin, Department for Agricultural Economics, vol. 66(2), June.
    • Handle: RePEc:ags:gjagec:303543
    DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.303543
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/303543/files/3_Schaefer.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.22004/ag.econ.303543?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. John Helming & Co Daatselaar & Wim van Dijk & Herman Mollenhorst & Seyyed Hassan Pishgar-Komleh, 2023. "Model Collaboration between Farm Level Models with Application on Dutch Dairy and Arable Farms Regarding Circular Agricultural Policy," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 15(6), pages 1-22, March.
    2. Kuhn, Till & Schäfer, David & Holm-Müller, Karin & Britz, Wolfgang, 2019. "On-farm compliance costs with the EU-Nitrates Directive: A modelling approach for specialized livestock production in northwest Germany," Agricultural Systems, Elsevier, vol. 173(C), pages 233-243.
    3. Julia Jouan & Julia Heinrichs & Wolfgang Britz & Christoph Pahmeyer, 2019. "Integrated assessment of legume production challenged by European policy interaction: a case-study approach from French and German dairy farms," Working Papers hal-02501428, HAL.
    4. Kuhn, T. & Enders, A. & Gaiser, T. & Schäfer, D. & Srivastava, A.K. & Britz, W., 2020. "Coupling crop and bio-economic farm modelling to evaluate the revised fertilization regulations in Germany," Agricultural Systems, Elsevier, vol. 177(C).
    5. Young, Michael & Young, John & Kingwell, Ross S. & Vercoe, Philip E., 2023. "Evaluation of the least cost option to manage pastures in a wet winter in south-eastern Australia," AFBM Journal, Australasian Farm Business Management Network, vol. 20(3), August.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ags:gjagec:303543. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: AgEcon Search (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/iahubde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.