Life Cycle Assessment and environmental comparison of electricity generation from hydropower, considering technical and climate boundary conditions
As a result of the worldwide increasing energy demand and the resulting increase of greenhouse gas emissions,the topic of renewable electricity generation is getting more relevant.Hydropower,as the currently most relevant renewable electricity source,had a share of 14%of the world electricity production in 2011.Hydropower plants show a wide variety of design which depends on local and regional conditions.There are three main plant types; their use depends on local landscape conditions: Run-of-river plants,storage plants and pumped-storage plants.The plant type influences the construction and end-of-life of the plant life cycle.Since pumped-storage plants are constructed to store and refine electricity,their environmental impacts have to be evaluated separately.Besides the hydropower plant type,the climate and vegetation region in which the hydropower plants are located is a second influence factor.The flooding of vegetated regions during plant operation causes gases resulting of biomass degradation.These gases,depending on the climate region,mainly consist of carbon dioxide or methane.Both gases have an important impact on the greenhouse gas effect.The objective of the study was to develop new country-specific Life Cycle Assessment(LCA)models which imply the three hydropower plant types and their share of the country-specific electricity production.A further task was to identify and compare in a more detailed way the environmental impacts of hydropower in different countries depending on climate and vegetation conditions.The resulting LCA models,which were designed for the LCA software and database GaBi,describe all relevant environmental impacts which occur during construction phase,use phase and end-of-life of the respective hydropower plant type.Environmental impacts,like the global warming potential,acidification potential,eutrophication potential and photochemical ozone creation potential as well as the primary energy demand can be assessed and evaluated.The integration of the developed hydropower LCA models into the GaBi energy database leads to a significant quality improvement of results especially for countries with high hydropower share like Norway or Brazil.Through this integration,the results of the presented study are already in use by industry,e.g.energy,automotive or chemical industry for the environmental assessment of their products.The paper focuses on the chosen input data for the LCA and shows the methodology and results for the country-specific assessment of hydropower.
Hydropower life cycle assessment LCA country-specific run-of-river plants storage plants pumped-storage plants climate
Michael Baumann Oliver Schuller
University of Stuttgart,Dept.Life Cycle Engineering(GaBi),Stuttgart,Germany PE International AG,Leinfelden-Echterdingen,Germany
国际会议
桂林
英文
1-6
2013-07-16（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）