Impact of cogeneration on integrated resource planning of Turkey

In most developing countries, difficulties in finding sector-specific data on heat rate and power demands make energy planning a hard task. In some countries, although this data is available, it may be four or five years old. In the present work, a new low-cost method is proposed for developing countries aiming at obtaining such data for the industrial sector quickly. Fifty-two textile factories were selected for a survey to represent the industrial sector. The data were processed and used to generate two scenarios of cogeneration applications in the industrial sector; one sized according to the electrical load of the factories, and the other one according to the thermal load. The costs and primary energy requirements of these programs were compared with that of the nuclear alternative. It was found that the most energy efficient and economical option for Turkey was the cogeneration program, the equipment sizing of which was based on the process heat demand of the industrial sector. Turkey would not only save US$ 72.6-billion by deferring the nuclear program, but it will also reduce the total primary energy demand by 11% in 2020. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.