A recent news item about JSW's planned biomass supply partnership with Punjab Renewable Energy Systems (PRESPL), one of the more organized players in the biomass supply sector brings up the importance of having large and reliable aggregators such as PRESPL.
Biomass being a highly distributed energy source, it has a rather complex and nuanced supply chain. While there could be many small players in the middle - from the farm to the aggregator - having reasonably large aggregators is critical to get large firms like JSW to shift to biomass.
A large steel plant can have power plant capacities in 100s of MW, and if biomass is used even at a 10% blend, a 300 MW power plant could require over 500 tons of biomass every day. Can you imagine the JSW procurement guy trying to coordinate with ten different suppliers for this vast quantity every day?
