Global power production: Regionalized Emissions and Impact Assessment

Electricity generation and its related emissions exert a great deal of pressure on the environment, with associated impacts having a localized or global nature. The main objective of this project is to model and compile information about emissions into air and water on a power plant level, producing the most comprehensive global regionalized inventory of the electricity industry and its emissions, and calculating the associated impacts on ecosystems and human health.

A big part of our work builds upon the Platts WEPP (World Electric Power Plants) database, which provides information on a generating unit level. Part of our efforts is concentrated on developing methods to populate the gaps in the database, so as to be able to use these in further thermodynamic or regression models for the emission calculations. In other studies on hydropower we build on freely available databases: GRanD (Global Reservoirs and Dams) and CARMA (DownloadCARbon Monitoring for Actionvertical_align_bottom).

Emissions to water: So far we have already produced the most complete global inventory of heat emissions into freshwater from thermoelectric power plants employing once-through cooling systems. These data have been used in further models to produce a global, regionalized picture of the extent of thermal pollution of freshwater bodies, in terms of water temperature increase and in terms of impacts on aquatic biodiversity within the framework of LCIA. The thermal pollution impacts will be linked to global trade patterns to produce the thermal footprint of nations.

Doctoral thesis of Catherine Raptis

Emissions to air: We are also working on the assessment of airborne emission impacts from coal-fired electricity production on a regional scale. Thus we link mine-level data with international trade data and a transportation model to quantify regional coal supply to power plants. Emissions to air are quantified along the entire supply chain and during power generation so that impacts on health and environment can be estimated based on the population density and vulnerability of nature in specific regions. We then compare the costs and benefits of different technological options for world-wide emission abatement at an unprecedented level of detail. Furthermore, the biogenic carbon emissions of hydropower will be estimated by regression modelling for individual plants.

Impacts from water consumption: The electricity industry is a major freshwater consumer and we are modelling water consumption of hydropower in high spatial detail and considering monthly water scarcity and reservoir storage changes. In the next steps of this project the impacts due to freshwater consumption thermoelectric power will also be quantified on a plant level.

Doctoral thesis of Stephan Pfister

Together, the impacts from freshwater consumption, and emissions to air and water, will provide a complete view of the global environmental pressures induced by electricity generation.