FINANCIAL CUM ENERGY STUDY OF GASIFIER PROCESS HEATING SYSTEM FOR DIARY INDUSTRIES IN INDIA

Depletion of conventional fuels, climate change and sustainable development are the recent principal factors when it comes to energy utilization and its activities. To mitigate the factors like climate change and fossil fuel depletion, energy exploitation from renewable energy resources is much anticipated for future energy needs. Developing countries like India, has a huge potential to meet their energy needs from biomass based technologies. Among the various technologies, gasification can be implemented in small and medium scale industries are successful. However, there is less momentum towards its implementation even though it looks attractive. Diary industries in India utilize temperature in the range of 60 – 260˚ C for pasteurization and could be easily retrofitted with the gasifier systems for their thermal needs. In this work, the financial evaluation for gasifier industrial process heating (GIPH) is diary industries is analyzed. The total annual thermal requirement in each state is spread equally based on the number of available milk processing plants. Thus Levelized unit cost of thermal energy (LCUTE) that a gasification system can offer is calculated and compared with suggested solar thermal heating. Other financial evaluation such as payback period, net present value, and internal rate of return for the investment is also estimated