Techno-economic assessment of biogas-fed CHP hybrid systems in a real wastewater treatment plant

The integration of solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) systems and micro gas turbines in a reference wastewater treatment plant is proposed. The main scope is to utilize the available biogas in a real wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) to feed both the SOFCs and micro gas turbines (MGTs) to produce electrical power while covering the digester thermal demand of the plant. To do so, two cases namely SOFC-WWTP (in which the SOFC system is the only CHP unit), and SOFC-MGT-WWTP (integration of both SOFCs and microturbine systems) are proposed. Results show that use of microturbines along with the SOFC systems can increase the share of electricity covered by self-generation within the WWTP by up to 15% while keeping stable the coverage of the thermal load. Also, the energy efficiency of the novel system (SOFC-MGT-WWTP) is calculated to be 7% more than that of the SOFC-WWTP. Economic analysis results reveal that using microturbines, the payback time for whole the system could be reduced about 4 years. Also, for the short term scenario, the levelized cost of electricity for the SOFC-MGT-WWTP system is found to be 0.118 $/kWh which is about 12% less than that for the SOFC-WWTP system. However, for the long term scenario, the difference becomes remarkably less. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.