Feasibility Study of Renewable Energy Generation Opportunities for a Dairy Farm

Abstract

The current study investigated the feasibility of renewable energy harvesting to meet the energy need of a dairy farm in Shahroud, Iran. Therefore, considering the available renewable resources including solar, wind, and biomass in the site and the electrical demand of the farm, the techno-economic and environmental analyses were carried out. By using Homer software, the optimized system was selected. It was shown that although there was wind potential within the farm site, the most economical system would be a system consisting of a 100 kW biomass power plant and a 169 kW PV plant. Furthermore, by using RETScreen software, the economic and environmental analyses for the selected system were carried out. The simple and equity paybacks were 5.8 and 4.2 years for the proposed system, which confirmed the economic feasibility of the proposed system. Moreover, the gross annual GHG emission would be reduced by 91.5 %. The techno-economic and environmental analyses conducted in the current paper confirmed that the proposed system could be easily extended for other dairy farms, which resulted in a significant increase in the energy ratio of the dairy farms.