Renewable Heat for the Fulfillment of the Cooling Demand in the Fruit and Vegetable Processing and Preserving Industries in the Intensive Agriculture: A Case Study in Southern Spain

Abstract

The post-harvest processing at fruit and vegetable pack-houses and logistic centers (FVPLC) in locations where, as it occurs in Southern Spain, these facilities and greenhouses co-exist in a dense and interconnected environment constitute an interesting field for the application of renewable sources of energy. The availability and conscious management of solar radiation, necessary for driving the greenhouses food production, as well as the availability of biomass, both in the form of plants wastes and, eventually, in the form energy crops allow to advance a high potential for the use of these renewable heat sources in such agro-industrial cluster constituted by greenhouses, FVPLC and auxiliary industries. In this work, it is carried the estimation of the values of some specific technical and environmental indexes of performance of the cold stores that are part of these facilities under two energy supply scenario: a conventional mains scenario and an alternative scenario in which cooling demand is fulfilled by thermally driven absorption devices. Cooling loads at regional and facility levels, the last thanks to the access to actual case studies, have been evaluated and used as input for the estimation and analysis of the following indexes under the two advanced scenarios: annual energy consumption, specific electricity consumption for cooling and equivalent CO 2 emissions.