A feedstock supply model integrating the official organization for China's biomass generation plants

Shortage of feedstock has hindered the development of China's biomass power generation because it is highly difficult to collect straw in China. We pioneered a new feedstock supply model in which the formal official organization of villagers' committees is introduced. Different from the previous feedstock supply patterns, the immaterial utility of relative stakeholders and the impact of villagers' committees on farmers' behavior are considered in this paper. To compare this pattern's performance with that of the conventional ones, this paper developed a multi-agent model specifically for China's situation. We applied the model to simulate the operation of a biomass supply chain. The results show that the proposed feedstock supply pattern can significantly increase the profits of biomass plants, biomass supply amounts, and farmers' participation, and in contrast with the broker pattern, it can lower feedstock prices through disintermediation. Sensitivity analyses show that preferential feed-in tariffs are still necessary for biomass power and that the new pattern can ease the government's subsidy burdens. Additionally, farmers' opportunity costs for supplying biomass, their perceptions of immaterial utility and the cooperative's financial resource schemes of the public welfare fund all have differing impacts on the achievement of the new pattern.