Applicability of trigeneration systems in the hotel buildings: The North Cyprus case

Abstract

In North Cyprus (N. Cyprus), the installed power capacity fails to meet the demand in severe winter and summer conditions thus; new power capacities are needed to supply the required demand. One way of dealing with the deficiencies resulting from the inadequacy of installed power capacity is to make the distributed power widespread, especially the trigeneration systems which exploit energy in the fuel in the most efficient way by producing heat, electricity and cooling simultaneously. The objective of the present work is to propose a methodology through which the decision makers can assess the applicability of trigeneration systems for the hotel sector. The power demand of a representative hotel in N. Cyprus was monitored and segregated into base and cooling components for typical days of summer. On the other hand, five hotels were selected for conducting surveys on their electricity and heat demands. Correlations were obtained for the representative hotel for two different scenarios of capacity sizing; in scenario 1, it was aimed to meet the maximum value of the base electrical load of the hotels and in scenario 2 the aim was to meet the minimum base electrical load. The experimental correlations were used in determining the capacities of the trigeneration systems for the other five hotels. An economical feasibility analysis is carried out for both scenarios. The results showed that the application of trigeneration systems to the hotel sector in N. Cyprus can be feasible. It is found that application of scenario 2 is more feasible than application of scenario 1. For the representative hotel the simple payback period and savings to investment ratio of the trigeneration application based on scenario 2 is found to be 3.3 years and 1.8 respectively, which are acceptable. Other hotels investigated in this work also have similar results when the scenario 2 is applied. In addition to this, it is found that further benefit is achieved if the excess electricity is sold to the utility. By the application of scenario 2 to the hotels considered in this work; total annual electricity production by the systems would be 16.7 GWh. Considering the electricity production by the utility via gas turbines was 4 GWh in the year 2007, the application of the trigeneration systems would not only erase the running and maintenance costs of these old and inefficient units but also reduce the load coming to the power plants.