Suchergebnisse

The topic Sustainable Development has brought a wide discussion across a number of sectors in our society, namely in Power Systems. Given the need to address other concerns than the economic ones, decision makers must take into account the rationale that lies beneath strategic choices, such as investing in generation technologies using renewable energy or rather doing business as usual and installing fossil fuel power plants. In this paper logic models were used as a decision-aid supporting tool, with the aim of contributing to the assessment of the possible impacts of different power plants in terms of sustainable development. The analyzed electricity generation technologies were grouped in thermal, renewable energy sources (RESs) and nuclear. The literature review fed the construction of three relational diagrams to allow the visualization of environmental, social and economic causes and effects of the three groups of technologies. Departing from these initial diagrams a set of interviews with experts was conducted to enrich and validate the logic models. The results of the literature review and of these interviews allowed to conclude that the use of RES has wider positive social impacts on the long run, despite their short-term higher costs compared to the traditional groups (nuclear and thermal). These logic models revealed to be a useful tool providing a valuable starting approach for an Impact Assessment of the ongoing change that power systems have been going through. ; This work was financed by the QREN – Operational Programme for Competitiveness Factors, the European Union – European Regional Development Fund and National Funds – Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, under Project FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-011377 and Project ...

A Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) tool was designed and used to support the evaluation of different electricity production scenarios. The MCDA tool is implemented in a user-friendly Excel worksheet and uses information obtained from a mixed integer optimization model, to produce a set of optimal schemes under different assumptions. Given the input, the MCDA allowed ranking different scenarios relying on their performance on 13 criteria covering economic, job market, quality of life of local populations, technical and environmental issues. The MCDA tool was used by a group of experts and academics with background in economics, engineering and environment. Regarding the totality of results, both the most and least expensive scenarios ranked first the same amount of times. These scenarios were, respectively, "Coal", relying mainly in new coal power plants and "Maximum Renewable", relying mainly in new wind and hydro power facilities. The opinions were divided towards these two solutions with different fundamental characteristics: "Maximum Renewable" with costs higher than "Coal" but leading to substantial reduction of the external energy dependency. Sensitivity analysis suggests that, although the costs are regarded as the most important criterion, those who had different rankings in their preferences have different attitudes towards other criteria. ; This work was financed by: the QREN Operational Programme for Competitiveness Factors, the European Union e European Regional Development Fund and National Funds e Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, under Project FCOMP-01- 0124-FEDER-011377 and Project ...

This paper focus on the assessment of the social dimension of electricity planning, resourcing to participative methodologies. A guide for interviewing power systems experts, covering a wide range of themes is presented. The guide focus on evolution of electricity consumption and supply according to each type of technology, driving forces among emerging technologies, energy policy, the relevance of sustainable development among institutions and markets and, finally, a first impression on the relevance of social impacts for candidate technologies. The main aim of the methodology is to gather discourses among experts and try to understand the connection between narratives and their consequences on the best scenarios under the social point of view. Therefore, the interview uses both uantitative and qualitative questions. The former are used for creating electricity generation scenarios within a 10 year range, while the latter aim at gathering each position's underlying explanations, which will be useful for cluster analysis in future work. The results presented in this paper refer to interviews which took place among the members of the working group of the project "Sustainable Electricity Power Planning". ; This work was financed by: the QREN – Operational Programme for Competitiveness Factors, the European Union – European Regional Development Fund and National Funds- Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, under Project FCOMP-01- 0124-FEDER-011377 and Project ...