Research on green power dispatching based on an emergy-based life cycle assessment

Abstract

Environmental protection pressures and green energy strategies have created major challenges for a cleaner production of China's coal-fired power generation. Although China's electric power dispatching department has tried to prioritize clean energy, the current dispatching models lack environmental indicators related to coal-fired power generation. The main purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive environmental indicator for the cleanliness evaluation of coal-fired power plants. In this paper, the (Emergy-based Life Cycle Assessment) Em-LCA method is used to measure and analyze environmental related resource consumption, socio-economic investment, and emissions in the whole life cycle of coal-fired power plants. At the same time, based on the above three environmental impacts in the whole life cycle, this paper constructs the (Em-LCA based Cleaner Production Comprehensive Evaluation) ECPCE index to guide a green dispatching plan. By comparing the calculation results of the index, this paper finds that there are differences in the environmental advantages of different generating units in green dispatching, which are closely related to the process management of coal-fired power plants in production and the environment.