Abstract

Biomass is one of the most efficient renewable energy sources to increase energy security and reduce the environmental issues. It could be utilised as back-up or main source of energy in off-grid remote northern communities of Canada, which are currently rely on fossil-fuels. However, small scale of energy demand, necessity of continuous energy supply, and spatial dispersion of such remote communities restrict the competitiveness and efficiency of bioenergy.
Managing bioenergy supply chain from supplying biomass to conversion facilities is vital to overcome the challenges in expanding bioenergy production. In this sense, forming collaboration among the entities plays a key role to improve the economy of scale and efficiency of bioenergy production. In the literature, several coordination strategies resulted in varying impacts on entities’ profit or cost. As such, analyzing and comparing them in various conditions could assure selecting the most efficient one. This study recommends quantity discounts and cost-sharing coordination policies to promote the biomass level at communities in a cost-efficient manner through establishing bundling orders and benefiting the lower cost.
This dissertation employs a system dynamics approach to simulate coordination scenarios and make the optimal decisions in a biomass supply chain including suppliers, hubs, and end-user. On that basis, performing a comparative analysis under various conditions and assumptions provide insights into the impact of coordination and selecting the preferred choice of coordination strategy for each player. The simulation-based optimization model is applied to a bioenergy supply chain case study in Canada’s off‐grid northern communities. The results of this research point to a significant role of coordination in improving the cost efficiency as well as the level of biomass-based energy production.