A Multi-Energy Bio-Gas Production Plant Exploiting Electrical Market Services Provision

This paper presents the results to identify optimization strategies to exploit the flexibility provided by a biogas production plant. This plant, located in Murcia (Spain) is one of seven real-life case studies of multi-energy systems, located in different European countries under analysis in the EU MAGNITUDE project. The facility Murcia Este is a wastewater treatment plant WWTP, with the production of biogas as a result of Anaerobic Digestion. The biogas produced is completely exploited to self-sustain the electricity and heat plant demands. The flexibility provision ability is given as ancillary market participation, in particular by manual frequency regulation reserve (mFRR) provision. The model of the plant refers to a base case, consisting of the current configuration and management, and to several possible extensions, improving devices and management strategies. The experimentations carried out are based on weekly data, each one associated with the seasons and to two “critical” weeks. The results show the plant can successfully provide the market service in the current configuration (base case) and in the improvements proposed, for all the six weeks data identified. The improvement which provides the best results is the heat storage,  currently not installed,  which ensures an interesting decoupling between the biogas production and the heat demand/service provision.