Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Table
Comparative risks of different energy sources
expressed as years of life lost per billion kilowatt-hours, based on
an end-to-end analysis for Germany
.
Coal
Natural gas
Nuclear
Photovoltaic
Wind
Source: Ref. [
]
for coal, gas, and several forms of carbon-free energy (not
totally carbon-free but nearly so) [
]. Life-cycle
emissions take the total emissions coming from every-
thing except burning the fuel (making the steel and con-
crete used in the plant, mining and transporting the fuel,
maintaining, repairing, and upgrading the plant, etc.),
averaging them over the expected lifetime of the plant to
get non-fuel emissions per hour and adding that to the
direct emissions from operations. In this kind of analysis
even wind power, which uses nothing but the natural
wind to generate electricity, has some life-cycle emissions
from manufacturing and maintaining the wind turbines.
Replacing coal plants or gas plants with any of the carbon-
free sources can make big reductions in greenhouse gas
emissions even when every input is included. Even
replacing coal plants with gas plants makes a big reduction
in emissions.
It is also worth taking a look at the comparative risks of
all the main sources of electricity.
Table
,
,
summarizes
estimates made by W. Krewitt and colleagues on
the comparative risks of various energy systems [
.
].
