# Biomass District Heating Systems Based on Agriculture Residues
## 4 Application of the Methodology  
In this section is presented the application of the methodology to a specific region. The continental area of Spain has been selected to add new analyses to the previously presented to other DH systems in the same region but different typologies of district heating systems [8; 9]. For the study of BioDH potential within this area, municipalities with a population above 1500 inhabitants and without natural gas supply were selected to apply the methodology. Under this criteria in the area under study, there are 501 municipalities with these characteristics. In them the application of the methodology estimates that the required heating power of BioDH systems would range from 4.5 to 69 MW, with an operating range of 875 to 2619 equivalent hours, Figure 5. The energy demanded by these systems would go from 6.8 to 130 GWh per year, with a total of 12,148 GWh per year. In Figure 5 are represented for these 501 municipalities the estimated installed power for heating as function of the equivalent working hours of the heating system. Figure 5: Installed power and equivalent working hours. It can be seen in Figure 5 that most of the systems require a thermal power in the range of 7-20 MW, and the equivalent working hours mean value is around 1600 h.  
In Figure 6 the ratio between the agricultural biomass generated in each municipality per year and the total area in that municipality is shown. It can be verified that there is not a direct linear relationship between the municipality area and the agricultural biomass that can be collected. The link between area and potential agricultural biomass is affected by other variables. Among these factors are the variety of crops that exist in the municipalities; the orography and the forest areas. In Figure 7 are represented the total amount of forest biomass and agriculture biomass not covered with the own resources of the municipalities. The results are presented in three groups: municipalities with a population below 2000 inhabitants, municipalities with population in the range between 2000 and 5000 inhabitants and those municipalities with population above 5000 inhabitants. In the figure on the left are represented the existing biomass resources and in the figure on the right is represented the total demand. Tables and expressions presented in the methodology to quantify the agricultural biomass resource are directly applicable to this case study, as they are based on studies carried out in the continental region of Spain. For the application to other European regions the correction factors in Table 3 must be applied. Figure 6: Agricultural biomass generated in each municipality and municipality area. Figure 7: Agricultural, forest and remaining biomass for BioDH System. The biomass required for the supply of these 501 systems is 6980 kt. For each of the municipalities studied, the biomass availability varies between 3.9 kt and 74.3 kt. As can be seen in Figure 7, although renewable forestry and agricultural combined resources were used, they would be insufficient to satisfy the energy requirements for the municipalities. The percentage of agricultural biomass with respect to forest biomass in the potential contribution to the BioDH systems is 3.3% for municipalities with less than 2000 inhabitants, 4.9% for municipalities between 2000-5000 inhabitants and 6.7% for municipalities with more than 5000 inhabitants. Figures 8 and 9 show the amount of agricultural biomass resources available in each municipality in terms of their inhabitants with respect to the total demand that they require to implement BioDH systems. It will be therefore necessary to have biomass from other municipalities, which have not been included in the study because they do not have the potential for a heating network because they have natural gas or less than 1500 inhabitants but they have biomass resources.