Design Considerations of a Flexible Biogas Digester System for Use in Rural Communities of Developing Countries

Several challenges are associated with the development, adoption and deployment of biogas digesters in developing countries. Amongst these challenges is a comprehensive and systematic procedure for the design of digesters suitable for rural communities. This paper proposes the Flexible Biogas Digester System (FBDS) as a viable option for rural communities in developing countries and provides a detailed step-by-step procedure for its design. The biogas production process is a function of the digester operating factors which may be grouped into physical, process and performance parameters. The physical design parameters include the digester volume, the volume of the biogas storage tank, and the volume of the installation pit. The process parameters include total solid content of the slurry (TS), organic loading rate (OLR), digester operating temperatures, pH of the slurry inside the digester. The performance parameters include biogas production rate, biogas productivity and biogas quality. The Net Present Value and the Levelised Cost of Energy are presented for simple economic evaluation of the FBDS.

Management of Peak Loads in an Emerging Electricity Market

An electricity market is a trading platform provided by the actors in the electricity sector to sell and buy electricity while maintaining the stability of the transmission network and minimizing energy losses.The management of electrical energy for rational use consists of all the operations that the consumers can carry out in order to minimize their electricity bill,while the producers optimize their benefits and the transmission infrastructure.The reduction of active and reactive power consumption and the smoothing of daily and yearly load profiles are the main objectives in this work.Many developed countries already have properly functioning electricity markets,but developing countries are still in their infancy of deregulated electricity markets.The major tools used in smoothing the load profiles include decentralized generation,energy storage and demand response.A load power smoothing control strategy is proposed to smooth the load power fluctuations of the distribution network.The required power change is determined by evaluating the power fluctuation rate of the load,and then the required power change is allocated to some generators or to some stored reserves.Otherwise,the consumers are made to curtail their power consumption.The ideas proposed in this work provide important opportunities for energy policy makers and regulators.These ideas would only be feasible if there exists real-time communication among the actors in the electricity market.The results indicate that as much as 1100 Megawatt-hours of energy can be stored for smoothing the load profile,when applied to the Southern Interconnected Grid of the Cameroon power system;and that Time of Use(TOU)pricing could be used instead of rotating blackouts in case of energy shortage.