Sustainability quantification of renewable energy conversion systems for electricity supply

• Autor(a) principal: Mendes, Rui Pedro
• Data de Publicação: 2011
• Outros Autores: Gaspar, Pedro Dinis, Gonçalves, Luís Carlos Carrilho
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.6/7317
• topic: Sustainability indicators; Renewable Energy; Electricity supply

The sustainability of renewable energy conversion systems for electricity supply is quantified and compared. The energy conversion systems considered are: wind, photovoltaic, geothermal, hydro, hydrogen, ocean (wave and tidal power) and nuclear. The sustainability analysis is performed covering technological, economic, environmental and social aspects. The indicators selected to characterize and quantify the sustainability of each subgroup are: efficiency, lifetime, electricity generation cost, capital cost, CO2 emissions, area occupied, employment creation and social acceptance. Membership functions are applied to determine the sustainability index that quantifies how sustainable is each energy conversion system depending on the most relevant indicator. This procedure includes a weighting coefficient that varies in each case study to magnify the importance of one indicator relatively to the others. Sustainability indices are compared in order to assess the energy conversion systems mix for electricity supply more sustainable now and in the near future. Comparing the several case studies, the global sustainability indicators suggest that the mix of energy conversion systems for electricity supply should be based on hydro, wind and nuclear systems.