Trigeneration - a green approach for meeting total building service requirement

Abstract

Tourism industry in the country is presently seeing a considerable growth, with demand for hotel and accommodation industry to keep pace. In expanding this sector, provision of electricity and other utilities is essential. In this regard, the availability of electricity supply and the quality of available power are serious concerns when it comes to expanding the facility to remote but attractive areas. As a means of handling this situation, in this paper the possibility of using stand alone trigeneration to meet, cooling and electricity demand of such facilities is explored and compared with the present system of grid connected power and diesel based heat generation. A comparison of the two systems; trigeneration and present base case scenario, reveals that there will be over 50% reduction in CO2 emission and about 41% saving in energy bills over those of base case when a trigeneration system is sized based on the criterion of meeting total cooling demand using vapour absorption refrigeration. A simple payback estimates shows that recovery of investment for trigeneration system is well under two years.