Optimization of thermal energy and ammonia (NH3) provided for an agricultural conservatory system, capitalizing on resource synergy using linear programming

The increasing demand for conservatory horticulture highlights the significant difficulty of providing environmentally friendly energy to maintain appropriate indoor conditions. This project seeks to minimize the national cost of powering and fertilizing agricultural conservatories throughout India using excess industrial thermal energy and ammonia (NH 3 ), with the goal of replacing the country’s 0.49 Mt yr −1 horticulture imports. There are four clear goals that drive the research to determine the total amount of surplus heat (≤150 °C) and nitrogen gas that can be found within 2 km of horticulturally suitable land (≥2 ha) across the country. Create a technology-neutral mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) superstructure that chooses the most cost-effective combination of heat retailer, NH 3 retailer, land parcel, and optional binary-cycle power plant for each crop-specific conservatory, which leads to determining the marginal expansion cost and land area needed to replace 32 %, 54 %, 77 %, and 100 % of the current imports of fruits, vegetables, and nuts and locate geographic hotspots, cost drivers, and the potential for CO 2 mitigation within the resultant network. Utilizing 271 thermal and 52 NH 3 retailers, 20-year hourly ERA-5 climate data, and 1 km land-suitability layers, the MILP optimizes 4.8 million factors. The findings reveal that 225 ha of conservatories (83 ha of fruits, 41 ha of vegetables, and 101 ha of nuts) could entirely replace India’s 0.49 million metric tons of annual imports, all located within 2 km of refuse derived fuel, cement-kiln, or anaerobic digestion facilities. This includes 4,783 parcels, or 94 % of the total area. Compared to natural gas, waste-heat energy is 8–12 times less expensive, costing ₹0.17–0.70 kWh −1 . Light emitting diode illumination requires 110 GJ m −3 yr −1 of energy, of which 71 % may be recovered by binary-cycle units; peak heat can be supplied by 60–80 % by refused derived fuel plants. NH 3 logistics are cost-effective up to 180 ha clusters, but they become prohibitively expensive at 13.7 km haul distance. The southeast and western parts of India are the top areas for deployment because they can reduce yearly carbon emissions by 0.21 million metric tons and save 1.8 billion rupees in foreign currency. Industry and agriculture may work together to build a zero-carbon horticulture system that is self-sufficient, thanks to the open-source MILP framework. This framework is easily transportable to any nation having climate and industrial-stack data.