UNDERSTANDING ENERGY PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENTAL EXTERNALITIES - A LITERATURE REVIEW FROM AN ENGINEERING PERSPECTIVE

摘要

In this paper, 'externalities from electricity production' is used as defined by the ExternE project of the European Commission! because it is the largest study of this topic ever undertaken. The environmental and human health damages caused by electricity generation or transport are for the most part not integrated into the pricing system and are therefore called externalities. Internalization of external costs is intended as a strategy to rebalance the social and environmental dimension with the purely economic one, accordingly leading to greater environmental sustainability. It is impossible to review the entire externalities of energy production literature because Googling of externalities of energy production produced 950,000 sites. Similarly, when Googling ExternE, 68,500,000 sites were found. In addition, in Sterling's excellent 'Limits to the Value of External Costs,'2 there are approximately 250 citations. Further, consider that the EC initiated ExternE in 1991 and is still funding its extensions at a cost of greater than 10 million Euros. ExternE still has not produced a model that provides unambiguous answers to the 'correct' energy mix even in an aggregated form. Nor as we shall show, a 'correct' solution is not possible.