An Assessment of the Life Cycle Costs and GHG Emissions for Alternative Generation Technologies

摘要

There is significant debate regarding the best choices for supplying energy in a manner that can reduce greenhouse gas emissions to the maximum extent possible at a reasonable cost while still ensuring grid stability and reliability of supply. Many of these discussions look only at the amount of emissions that are associated with a particular form of energy during the period in which it is operating, ignoring the actual amount of energy created and the emissions associated with the development, maintenance and eventual decommissioning of the resource. Other studies assess the total life cycle emissions without reference to the amount of energy that can be delivered to the grid and offset sources of energy to maintain grid stability. In this paper, an analysis is performed to look at real life cycle costs and emissions as well as the amount of energy that is actually provided to the system from various renewable power alternatives, including wind, water and solar as well as from nuclear power. These alternative sources are then benchmarked against coal-fired energy production to establish a normalized assessment of the clean energy alternatives that are currently available