Exergoenvironmental analysis for evaluating coal-fired power plants technologies

Danilo H.D. Rocha, Diana S. Siqueira and Rogério J. Silva

Energy, 2021, vol. 233, issue C

Abstract: Coal is a source of fundamental importance for the global electrical matrix due to its massive use, its abundance, worldwide distribution, low price, and etc. Despite emerging environmental concerns, projections have shown that coal usage will be kept for a long time. This work brings the quantification of environmental impacts by the exergoenvironmental approach based on the Specific Exergy Cost (SPECO), establishing a baseline of impacts for conventional subcritical plants and providing data so far unavailable for comparison with other alternatives. The sensitivity analysis has identified the importance of the coal composition in the process. Changing from a subcritical power plant to a supercritical one represents a gain of 2.0% in exergy efficiency in the plant and also a reduction in the total environmental impact concerning electricity generation of 5.7%. Electricity generated by the subcritical system has an environmental impact rate of 41.40 mPts/kWh, and the total impact produced by the system to generate a unit of electricity is around 48.26 mPts/kWh. For the supercritical system the environmental impact is 38.90 mPts/kWh, and the total environmental impact produced in the generation of electricity is 45.50 mPts/kWh. The impact rates related to exergy destruction and the formation of pollutants were identified as the principal sources of environmental impact. Changes in the coal composition led to a strong influence on the environmental diagnosis, being responsible for a variation of more than 60% in the impact rate.

Keywords: Exergoenvironmental analysis; Life cycle assessment; Ultra-supercritical; Supercritical; Subcritical; Coal-fired (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544221014171
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:energy:v:233:y:2021:i:c:s0360544221014171

DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2021.121169

Access Statistics for this article

Energy is currently edited by Henrik Lund and Mark J. Kaiser

More articles in Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().