Aims
Methodology
Determine the demand profile at Mackie’s of Scotland
In order to simulate and establish full renewable energy autonomy from the grid, it was necessary to the current demand and its energy pattern at site. Mackie’s was able to provide their monthly and yearly demand for the past few years. However, assumptions were made to create hourly demand for Mackie’s of Scotland. Based on the information provided by Mackie’s, the demand is approximately 4 GWh/year.
Merit was used to generate the yearly demand curve from the annual electricity consumption. The annual electricity consumption is scaled to 4 GWh/year and the demand profile was then extracted to Homer for simulation and analysis. The demand is expected to increase due to the energy required for storing and refrigeration, and higher production rate of ice-cream due to high demand. However, the energy demand is expected to be lower during the winter due to lower production rate and energy consumption for cooling and storing.
Determine the weather data to give inputs for PV and Wind Turbines
A 2017 weather data is retrieved from NASA MERRA Reanalysis and CM-SAF’s SARAH dataset. The data is based on the site in Aberdeen City and it can be downloaded from here.
Establish the most cost-effective energy generation system for Mackie’s
Consider Mackie’s of Scotland has already installed a capacity of 3MW wind farm and 1.8MW PV farm, ‘Search Space’ feature is used to integrate the existing system into our analysis. After the analysis, the capacities required for the biogas generator and Li-ion batteries were known.
Determine the amount of feedstock required for anaerobic digestion
Once the required capacity for biogas was known, the sizing of the biogas was carried out to determine the amount of feedstock required for anaerobic digestion and the volume of storage tank for biogas. The methodology of biogas sizing can be accessed from here.
Feasibility Study
Financial and technical analysis were then carried out to determine the feasibility of the proposed system. The financial analysis can be accessed from here and the technical analysis can be accessed from here.
Furthermore, Environmental Impact Assessment was carried out to analyse and determine the impacts of proposed system. Further details about EIA can be accessed from here