Publicación: Hourly marginal electricity mixes and their relevance for assessing the environmental performance of installations with variable load or power
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2022-06-29
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info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
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Resumen
The ongoing energy transition is causing rapid changes in the electricity systemand, in consequence, the environmental
impacts associated with electricity generation. In parallel, the daily variability of generation increases with higher
shares of renewable energies. This affects the potential environmental impacts or benefits of deviceswith variable load
or power, such as electric vehicles, storage systems or photovoltaic home systems. However, recent environmental assessments
of the actual benefit of such systems are scarce, with existing assessments majorly using average grid mixes
that are frequently outdated and disregard the dynamic nature of renewable generation. This article provides detailed
hourly average and marginal electricitymixes for eachmonth of the year, determined for Spain as an illustrative country
with a diversified (renewable) power generation portfolio that experienced a rapid change in the last years. These
are combined with specific life-cycle emission factors for each generation technology. Main drivers for the impacts of
themarginalmix turn out to be natural gas plants and imports, but also pumped hydropower due to its comparably low
storage efficiency. Applied to a hypothetical photovoltaic rooftop installation, the differences between environmental
assessments on hourly and on annual basis are found to be surprisingly lowwhen assuming that the generated electricity
replaces the average grid mix, but substantial when considering the marginal generation mix (i.e., the generation
technologies that respond to a change in demand at a given time). This highlights the importance of considering the
dynamics of the electricity system and the corresponding marginal electricity mixes when optimizing flexible load
or generation technologies under environmental aspects.
Descripción
The registered version of this article, first published in Science of the Total Environment 843 (2022) 156963, is available online at the publisher's website:
ScienceDirect, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2022.156963
La versión registrada de este artículo, publicado por primera vez en Science of the Total Environment 843 (2022) 156963, está disponible en línea en el sitio web del editor: ScienceDirect, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2022.156963
Categorías UNESCO
Palabras clave
Energy storage, Decarbonisation, Life cycle assessment, Photovoltaics, Environmental impact, Inventory data, Spain
Citación
Jens F. Peters, Diego Iribarren, Pedro Juez Martel, Mercedes Burguillo, Hourly marginal electricity mixes and their relevance for assessing the environmental performance of installations with variable load or power, Science of The Total Environment, Volume 843, 2022, 156963, ISSN 0048-9697, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2022.156963
Centro
Facultades y escuelas::Facultad de Derecho
Departamento
Economía Aplicada y Gestión Pública