Technical–economic Evaluation of the Connection of Biomass Power Plants to the Cuban Electricity Power System

Abstract

Changing energy sources in electricity generation from fossil fuels to green sources is a necessity for achieving global development goals. Agricultural residues are an energy source with great potential worldwide, especially sugarcane and rice residues. At the present, technical–economic studies of electricity generation with biomass limit their field of action to generating systems and perform basic analyses of their impact on electricity power systems (EPS). The present work proposes to implement a procedure that expands these limits with the use of methods such as Contractual Path, Quadratic Cost Functions and Newton’s Fast Uncoupled in calculations of electrical losses, increases in initial investment costs, transmission costs and generation costs. The technical–economic indicators of the current EPS under study without and with the biomass power plants proposed by previous studies are compared, knowing that the introduction of these generators increases the installed capacity from 82.6 MW to 122.1 MW. A reduction of 0.72% in active power losses, 13.2% in transmission costs, 6 USD cents/kWh in generation costs and an increase of 34.41 USD/kW in initial investment costs to adequate the EPS under study (Connecting a power transformer and increasing the capacity of an overhead line) to the increase in generation are reported. Benefits of including biomass in the energy transition from a fossil fuel dependent generation matrix (95%) to a mixed one (51%) are demonstrated. These results demonstrate the ability of the procedure to effectively assess the impact of biomass power plant connection on EPSs.