Woody biomass combined heat and power (CHP) business has the potential to contribute to carbon neutral futures. However, planning sustainable woody biomass CHP business over the medium to long term remains a significant challenge because of high initial costs, fuel price fluctuations, and difficulties in effective heat utilization. To solve these problems, our previous study has developed a planning support tool for CHP business. However, the developed tool was not easy to use because it was designed for experts with specialized knowledge. In Japan, non-experts are often involved in the planning of CHP business. To tackle this challenge, this paper aims to develop a system that helps non-experts plan woody biomass CHP business. Towards this end, we conducted several interviews with CHP business providers in Japan to identify critical problems for non-experts. These problems included difficulties in creating business scenarios for non-experts, complexity in quantitative evaluation that requires building simulation models and setting many input parameters, and lack of support to assess uncertainties. For addressing these problems, we develop a planning support system including three key functions: (1) business scenario creation, (2) simplified simulation for economic evaluation, and (3) What-if analysis for uncertainty assessment. The validity of the developed system was then tested through experiments with 8 non-experts. Results showed that all the participants successfully developed multiple business scenarios (average: 14.3 scenarios) in approximately 2 hours and made planning decisions based on quantitative assessment.
Yamaguchi et al. (2026) studied this question.