OPPORTUNITIES FOR BIOENERGY IN POLAND: BIOGAS AND SOLID BIOMASS FUELLED POWER PLANTS

The article analyses economic, environmental, energy policy-related and technological opportunities for the development of bioenergy in Poland. Bioenergy potential is compared with other four renewable energies, i.e. wind, hydro, solar and geothermal energies, taking into account national spatial considerations. It is shown that bioenergy is highly sustainable, can be relatively cheap in Poland in the near-term, exhibits several environmental benefits and that its development can be stimulated by the newly modified Polish system of green certificates. However, the financial support in the new system can mostly relate to innovative bioenergy technologies and not to large-scale co-combustion of biomass with coal in existing power plants, which is the dominating technology in Poland. Therefore, in the technological part of this work, the state of the art and innovative biopower technologies are briefly characterised. For biogas fuelled power plants the practicalities of gas engines and gas turbines operating in cogeneration, fuel cells and technologies for upgrading biogas to gaseous fuels, i.e. compressed biogas, bio-methane, bio-syngas and bio-hydrogen, are addressed. For solid biomass fuelled power plants the analysis is focused on direct combustion, dominating co-combustion, gasification, torrefaction, pyrolysis and thermal processing of wastes. Further, the practical thermodynamic design principles for solid biomass power plants are introduced and the concept of multi-step solid biomass gasification is presented, which is beneficial for distributed bioenergy systems minimising solid biomass transportation costs.