New approach for optimal electricity planning and dispatching with hourly time-scale air quality and health considerations

Abstract

Integrating accurate air quality modeling with decision making is hampered by complex atmospheric physics and chemistry and its coupling with atmospheric transport. Existing approaches to model the physics and chemistry accurately lead to significant computational burdens in computing the response of atmospheric concentrations to changes in emissions profiles. By integrating a reduced form of a fully coupled atmospheric model within a unit commitment optimization model, we allow, for the first time to our knowledge, a fully dynamical approach toward electricity planning that accurately and rapidly minimizes both cost and health impacts. The reduced-form model captures the response of spatially resolved air pollutant concentrations to changes in electricity-generating plant emissions on an hourly basis with accuracy comparable to a comprehensive air quality model. The integrated model allows for the inclusion of human health impacts into cost-based decisions for power plant operation. We use the new capability in a case study of the state of Georgia over the years of 2004-2011, and show that a shift in utilization among existing power plants during selected hourly periods could have provided a health cost savings of $175.9 million dollars for an additional electricity generation cost of $83.6 million in 2007 US dollars (USD 2007 ). The case study illustrates how air pollutant health impacts can be cost-effectively minimized by intelligently modulating power plant operations over multihour periods, without implementing additional emissions control technologies.air pollution | electricity generation | health impacts | externalities | energy policy I n 2013, coal was used to produce 39% of the electricity in the United States (1), the largest portion of generation from any fuel type. During combustion, electricity generation from fossil fuels, such as coal, produces large quantities of primary gaseous pollutants, such as sulfur dioxide (SO 2 ) and nitrogen oxide (NO X ), which are major contributors to air pollution. These gaseous emissions interact with the atmosphere downwind of source emissions, forming several secondary air pollutants, including sulfate-based fine particulates less than 2.5 μm in aerodynamic diameter (PM 2.5 ) and ozone (O 3 ). Sulfate-based PM 2.5 comprises an estimated average of 24% of the ambient PM 2.5 in the United States (2), and can be controlled, in part, by a reduction in SO 2 emissions. Increased PM 2.5 concentrations cause increased mortality and asthma rates, as well as nonfatal heart attacks, emergency room visits, and hospital visits (3).Previous studies have integrated air pollution impacts into energy system models, but these studies lacked heterogeneous hourly and seasonal temporal pollutant formation. Muller et al. (9) to assess the health impacts of major emissions sectors in the United States. These studies have all made important contributions to the quantitative understanding of the health impacts of air pollution from electricity, transportation, and industrial systems...

Understanding the industrial contribution to pollution offers opportunities to further improve air quality in the United States

“…This damage function is an often monetized representation of the impacts the economy can suffer from changes in environmental conditions. In the case of air pollution, impacts take the form of increased mortality and morbidity (11)(12)(13), losses of work hours and reduced productivity (14), losses in human capital (15,16) and social capital (17), and decreased recreational value (18), among others. The main advantage of working with IAMs is the possibility they offer to researchers and policy makers to visualize the current state of the economy and test alternative environmental policies or scenarios.…”

Research on Green Power Dispatching Based on an Emergy-Based Life Cycle Assessment

“…Sáenz et al proposed a two-stage economic and environmental load dispatching framework to fulfill the demand reliably at the lowest possible cost and to minimize emissions and other environmentally adverse effects [5]. Kerl et al integrated fluctuating pollutant information into electricity dispatching plan to encourage power plant including environmental impacts into cost-base decisions [6]. Liang X et al emphasized the importance of grid energy saving and environmental protection dispatching by constructing an energy saving and environmental protection (ESEP) model [7].…”

Sequential Relaxation of Unit Commitment with AC Transmission Constraints

“…Additionally, several papers have considered uncertainties of demand and renewable generation into consideration using stochastic and robust optimization frameworks [6]- [13]. The incorporation of several other power system optimization problems into unit commitment has been envisioned as well, such as the optimal power flow [14]- [16], network topology control [17], demand response [18], air quality control [19], and scheduling of deferrable loads [20]. Fariba Zohrizadeh and Mohsen Kheirandishfard are with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, the University of Texas at Arlington, (email: fariba.zohrizadeh@uta.edu, mohsen.kheirandishfard@uta.edu).…”