Assessing the life cycle environmental benefits of renewable distributed generation in a context of carbon taxes: The case of the Northeastern American market
التفاصيل البيبلوغرافية
العنوان:
Assessing the life cycle environmental benefits of renewable distributed generation in a context of carbon taxes: The case of the Northeastern American market
Distributed generation (DG) using renewable energy systems (RES) can play an important role in reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Given that DG could overlap with carbon tax implementation, the objective of this work is to assess the implications of introducing different carbon tax levels (from 0 to 100 US$/tonne of CO 2 ) and to assess the GHG abatement performance when DG is applied. To reach the paper objective, different levels of carbon taxes were assessed by using the developed partial equilibrium model for the North-eastern American electricity market. The developed model is crucial to (1) estimate the increase of the hourly market price for different carbon taxes scenarios, and (2) identify the hourly marginal electricity production technologies reducing its production as a consequence to DG. Results show that the increase of carbon taxes significantly decrease the environmental benefits as a consequence of DG. When considering GHG emissions, the 30 kW micro-wind turbine efficiency gets from −6.3 to −3.8 kg CO 2 eq/kW h, when carbon tax increases from 0 to 60 US$/tonne CO 2 eq (60% reduction). Same trend is observed for other environmental impacts, such as resource, human health and ecosystem quality. These results help in giving more insight on how two overlapping clean air policies interfere and how efficient they are in reducing GHG emissions at the same time.
