Model to Maximize Self-consumption of Olive Mills Powered by a Mixed System of Renewable Energies

Abstract

In recent years, due to the growth of petroleum prices  and  gas  emissions,  the  renewable  energies  have  been recommended like feed sources to different types of facilities,and therefore, since 2010 to 2020 the European Commission has established three key objectives related with climatic change and the energy sustainability like are reduction of the CO2 emissions, increase of the use of the renewable energies and the rise of the energy efficiency. A key sector are the produce installations of olive  oil  also  called  “olive  mills”,  where  there  is  a  great opportunity  to  reduce  the  electrical  consumption,  increase  the additional profits related to reduction of harmful technologies to the environment and reduce the costs in its maintenance. For this reason, this paper investigates and compares the technical and environmental feasibility of olive mills, powered by renewable sources such as; solar energy, wind energy, biomass energy or combination of them in Andalusia (South of Spain), having this region a huge energy dependency, but large amount of “green” resources to be used.

The feasibility of these systems will be carried out taking into account  the  cost,  power  generation,  CO2  equivalent  emissions and fraction of renewable energy, assuming that they are grid-connected.