Energy assessment of a biogas plant in northern Italy

In a historical period like the current one, in which the increasing need to mitigate climate change meets an energy price that is growing dramatically, it becomes of fundamental importance to monitor and continuously improve energy performance to overcome the economic crisis. The objective of the work carried out is to provide the company Società Estense Servizi Aziendali S.p.A. (hereinafter S.E.S.A.) with an assessment on the energy use in the period from January to August. The objective is to establish if company operating conditions are energetically optimized or not. To do this, the company's processes, consumption and production, operating conditions and technical characteristics of the plant, existing contracts and all the boundary conditions that can affect the result of the analysis were analyzed. A representative energy profile was then built and, starting from data collected, the optimal scenario for each month was established and compared with the real situation of the same month. What emerged, finally, is that the company is moving in the right direction, a result that now, thanks to the analysis, is numerically demonstrable. After the assessment, a forecasting model was developed to improve company energy performance.