Life Cycle Assessment of a High Temperature Molten Salt Concentrated Solar Power Plant

摘要

The well-known world energetic matter, mainly due to the worldwide growing energyrnconsumption gone with a reduction of oil and gas availability, and to the environmentalrneffects of the indiscriminate use of fossil fuels in our economy, is leading to therndevelopment of clean innovative technologies for the reduction of GHG emissions andrnthe creation of a more sustainable economic structure worldwide. But, realizing andrninstalling renewable energy plants have an environmental “footprint” that has to bernevaluated to quantify the real impact of renewable technologies on the environment.rnNowadays, the most important tool to evaluate this impact of a product is the Life CyclernAssessment (LCA). To this aim, several impact categories are defined; among these thernmost important are the Global Warming, the Abiotic Depletion, the Eutrophication, thernAcidification, the Land Use and the Human toxicity.rnThe aim of this work is to present a Life Cycle Assessment of an innovative solarrntechnology, the Molten Salt Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) plant, developed byrnItalian Research Centre ENEA and able to produce clean electricity by using solarrnenergy. The Life Cycle Assessment was carried out by means of the SimaPro7 software,rnone of the most used LCA software in the world. It is worth assess that these types ofrnsoftware are an indispensable tools for leading LCA studies. In the second part of thernstudy the environmental performance of the CSP plant was compared with these ofrnconventional oil and gas power plants.