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ISSN:2325-6192 (print)
ISSN:2325-6206 (online)
Journal of Environmental Accounting and Management
António Mendes Lopes (editor), Jiazhong Zhang(editor)
António Mendes Lopes (editor)

University of Porto, Portugal

Email: aml@fe.up.pt

Jiazhong Zhang (editor)

School of Energy and Power Engineering, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an, Shaanxi Province 710049, China

Fax: +86 29 82668723 Email: jzzhang@mail.xjtu.edu.cn

Emergy Analysis of a Biomass Direct-fired Power Plant in Inner Mongolia of China

Journal of Environmental Accounting and Management 1(4) (2013) 321--331 | DOI:10.5890/JEAM.2013.11.002

Mingyue Pang; Lixiao Zhang; Changbo Wang; Gengyuan Liu

State Key Joint Laboratory of Environmental Simulation and Pollution Control, School of Environment, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China

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Abstract

Though encouraged by a series of policies and measures, the biomass direct-fired power generation industry in China has not achieved expected rapid development, like other renewable electricity industries such as small hydropower, photovoltaic power and wind power. In this paper, an emergy analysis was performed to evaluate the overall performance and relative environmental sustainability of biomass direct-fired power production systems, taking a plant in Inner Mongolia as an example. The evaluation results show that the solar transformity of biomass direct-fired electricity in 2011 is 1.14E+05 seJ/J, similar to that of typical renewable electricity technologies and much lower than that of fossil fuel power plants. The comparison between the emergy-based indicators with those of other electricity production systems also confirms the outstanding performance of the biomass direct-fired power system, indicating that biomass direct-fired power technology itself is relatively well established in China now. However, one of the key constraints to the healthy development of the biomass direct-fired power industry is the unstable supply of raw materials and the resulting increased collection radius, which have a large effect on the sustainability performance of biomass direct-fired power systems in terms of emergy indicators.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 41371521) and National Science Foundation for Innovative Research Group (Grant No. 51121003).

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