Analysis of the hotel sector as a potential market for fuel cell-based cogeneration systems

The work of this master degree thesis has the aim to study the installation of FC-CHP in hotel sector. The adopted method consists in an analysis of historical consumption data related to hotels around the world. In literature, for each hotel the most relevant data were total energy consumption and energy intensity, in order to obtain a general behaviour of energy in hotels. After an initial research work, the study was focused on a technical analysis only on three geographical areas: USA, Europe and Singapore. For each of them load profiles have been done in order to see how fuel cell can cover the energy demands in the future. Analysing the consumption of various countries is possible to see a clear difference between the three climatic zones, for this reason corrective coefficients have been used to ensure a differentiation of locations. Through an Excel model, technical data were used in order to obtain the percentage of electric and thermal load that can be covered by the technology. At the end, processing technical data, an economic analysis has been reported in order to see the economic advantages of installing SOFC system as power generation. In this way, it was possible to see the costs trend during years compared with traditional system like boiler for domestic hot water production and electric grid from which buy electricity. The analysis has shown that, with the current investment cost, the installation of the cogeneration system is not convenient in all the locations chosen even with the existing subsidies in countries where they are expected. This is mainly due to the current costs, still too high compared to a traditional system. The positive aspect is that, by using target cost, the expenditure with respect to a traditional system decreases and, therefore, the investment can be considered convenient. In target scenario, with the existing subsidies, in all US locations the FC-CHP system is better than a conventional one, with a RPBT of 3 years. In Europe, Germany and Italy are the best countries in which the installation of fuel cell is convenient. The reason is the presence of economic subsidies that are not found for other locations. Among the two, that have the same installed power of 50 kW, Germany has a better subsidy system, in fact it has a 3-year RPBT (compared to 7 in Italy) and a relative NPV= 387074 €, 3 times higher than the Italian one. At last, in Singapore, since subsidies for CHP systems were not found, their installation is never convenient. In fact, the reference system is still better than the cogeneration one, both in current and target scenario.