Events Calendar

PhD Seminar

Speaker: Rebecca Peer, Environmental Engineering PhD Candidate, University of Southern California

Talk Title: Spatiotemporal analysis of environmental trade-offs in electricity generation

Abstract: The US power sector is a leading contributor of emissions that affect air quality and climate. It also requires a lot of water for cooling thermoelectric power plants. Although these impacts affect ecosystems and human health unevenly in space and time, there has been very little quantification of these environmental trade-offs on decision-relevant scales. This work quantifies hourly water consumption, emissions (i.e. carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and sulfur oxides), and marginal heat rates for 252 electric generation units (EGUs) in the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) region in 2011 using a unit commitment and dispatch model (UC&D). Annual, seasonal and daily variations, as well as spatial variability are assessed. When normalized over the grid, hourly average emissions and water consumption intensities (i.e. output per MWh) are found to be highest when electricity demand is the lowest, as baseload EGUs tend to be the most water and emissions intensive. Results suggest that a large fraction of emissions and water consumption are caused by small number of power plants, mainly baseload coal-fired generators. Replacing 8-10 existing units with modern natural gas combined cycle units would result in reductions of 19-29%, 51-55%, 60-62%, and 13-27% in CO2 emissions, NOx emissions, SOx emissions, and water consumption, respectively, across the ERCOT region for two different conversion scenarios.

Host: Kelly Sander

Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 101

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Kaela Berry