Environmental benchmarking of the largest fossil-fueled electricity generating plants in the U.S

摘要

Environmental management, to be effective, requires performance evaluation and process improvement. This is especially the case in fossil-fueled electricity generating plants. Although eco-efficient management of these types of organizations are critical to local, national and global environmental issues, few studies have focused on performance measurement and eco-efficiency improvements in this industry. This study evaluates the eco-efficiencies of the top 100 major U.S. "fossil-fueled electricity generating plants from 1998 data. Using a multi-criteria non-parametric productivity model (data envelopment analysis) efficiency scores are determined. These efficiency scores are treated by a clustering method in identifying benchmarks for improving poorly performing plants. Efficiency measures are based on three resource input measures including boiler generating capacity, total fuel" heat used, and total generator capacity, and four output measures including actual energy generated, SO2, NOx, and CO2 emissions. The purpose of this paper is two-fold, to introduce the methodology's application to eco-efficiency performance measurement and show some characteristics of the benchmarked plants and groups.