DECARBONIZING CHEESE PRODUCTION IN ITALY THROUGH OPTIMIZED AND RENEWABLE ENERGY SUPPLY

The use of renewable energy, including solar process heating, and of efficient energy conversion technologies, have been considered in the literature to improve the energy performance of cheese production. However, most of the studies consider one energy source at time, or hardly account for the carbon emission impact of different energy supply alternatives. In this paper, a mixed integer linear programming model is developed and applied to a reference cheese factory in Italy to identify the least cost mix of solar process heating and natural gas-based trigeneration which allows to achieve assigned carbon emission reduction goals. It is found that, at current economic conditions, fossil fuel based trigeneration is economically attractive but does not contribute to decarbonization, whereas a combination of cogeneration and solar heating enables a good balance between economic savings and environmental constraints.