Regional power plan assessment accounting for environmental footprints

Abstract

Enabling a higher share of renewables in power planning at the municipal and regional scale is essential for offering local communities a path to sustainable development. However, the utilisation of renewables also carries certain environmental burdens which have to be accounted for in the process of system design and planning. The current paper takes this issue as a departure point, adding the electrical energy storage as a degree of freedom and its influence on the environmental footprints - represented by Greenhouse Gas and Water Footprints. The proposed model and the illustration case study clearly demonstrate the strong dependence of the footprints on the size of the storage facility. Future work should extend the model to account for all essential problem features - including a longer planning horizon, additional footprints and their interrelationships, as well as the interaction with the economic performance of the system.