Increasing the Economic Efficiency of a Cogeneration Plant through Heat Storage and Trigeneration

In this paper the authors present a case study for a Romanian district heating company with implementation of two measures that can lead to increasing the efficiency of the whole system (cogeneration plant and district heating network). The first measure is related to implementation of a heat storage unit that can optimize the operation of the cogeneration plant during the summer season. The measure is designed to reduce the cogeneration unit operation hours during the night time, when electricity tariffs are low, by using a heat storage tank. The second measure analyzes the opportunity of coupling of an absorption chilling machine to a cogeneration unit for producing cold that can be used in fruits and vegetables storage facility. This measure can lead to increasing the operation time of the cogeneration equipment and, thus, to all advantages of combined energy generation (power, heat and cold).