Potential for Energy Production from Farm Wastes Using Anaerobic Digestion in the UK: An Economic Comparison of Different Size Plants

Anaerobic digestion (AD) plants enable renewable fuel, heat, and electricity production, with their efficiency and capital cost strongly dependent on their installed capacity. In this work, the technical and economic feasibility of different scale AD combined heat and power (CHP) plants was analyzed. Process configurations involving the use of waste produced in different farms as feedstock for a centralized AD plant were assessed too. The results show that the levelized cost of electricity are lower for large-scale plants due to the use of more efficient conversion devices and their lower capital cost per unit of electricity produced. The levelized cost of electricity was estimated to be 4.3 p/kWhe for AD plants processing the waste of 125 dairy cow sized herds compared to 1.9 p/kWhe for AD plants processing waste of 1000 dairy cow sized herds. The techno-economic feasibility of the installation of CO2 capture units in centralized AD-CHP plants was also undertaken. The conducted research demonstrated that negative CO2 emission AD power generation plants could be economically viable with currently paid feed-in tariffs in the UK.