Profitability Assessment of the Cogeneration System

Abstract

From Chapter 1 it is clear that nowadays electricity and cooling demands are growing considerably worldwide, and that also there is a necessity to provide these by using more efficient and cleaner technologies, as the proposed in the present book.

A profitability assessment is determinant to decide the implementation and use of some technologies; because of this in the present chapter, an economic analysis of a cogeneration system that consists of a PEM fuel cell coupled to an absorption air conditioning system PEMFC-AACS is presented.

Several studies about the profitability of PEM fuel cells have been made by Farbir and Gómez (1996), Tsuchiya and Kobayashi (2004), Bar-On et al. (2002), Zoulias and Lymberopoulos (2007), and Chang et al. (2007). In these studies, the authors detail in a very precise way which are the elements and parameters determinant that make profitable the use of this technology. Also they show future scenarios where the PEM fuel cell can be introduced massively in the market.

Because of the above, the present chapter does not show a detailed profitability assessment of the PEM fuel cells alone; the idea is to analyze the profitability of the cogeneration system in an integrated way considering that the use of a PEM fuel cell has already been decided.