Development of an exergo-economic and exergo-environmental tool for power plant assessment: evaluation of a geothermal case study

Exergo-Economic and Exego-environmental analyses are extremely powerful tools that allow designers to understand the mechanism of economic and environmental cost build-up inside an industrial power plant process. The knowledge of such mechanisms is of paramount importance in order to identify the components that have a greater impact on the final costs, allowing to focus on them for the improvement design effort. For that reason in this study, an application to allow less experienced users to perform such analyses is presented and discussed. The application has been developed in Matlab and Python and presents a spreadsheet interface that allows the user to recreate the analysed plant configuration. Once the scheme has been defined the application will automatically generate and solve the economic or environmental cost matrix. The application and the cost correlations have been tested over several cases and the results have been compared with other in-house tools. A geothermal case study is thus presented, in order to display the easiness and powerfulness of the developed tool.