Total Social Cost-Based Economic Evaluation Research On Natural Gas Cogeneration Project

As a high-efficiency and environment-friendly primary energy, natural gas is one of the most important sources for electricity and heat supply in some developed countries. Its usage for generating electricity in developing countries is gradually increased. Natural gas-fired cogeneration project is playing an important role in environment improvement, ecosystem facilitation and clean energy development. There is a big room for national capacity of natural gas-fired cogeneration projects to increase, but unfortunately its increase is still at a low speed, one of the main reasons behind is that all kinds of current evaluation methods for power generation project do not calculate external environment costs which are putting the power generation projects with remarkable environment benefits e.g. natural gas-fired power projects in a disadvantage position in the market competition. For the purpose of facilitating the development of natural gas-fired cogeneration projects, people shall carry on new type economic evaluation for natural gas cogeneration projects from the view of whole society and analyze its advantage in comparison with other types of power generation by combination of qualitative and quantitative method.Based on the scale of total social cost and national economic evaluation method, this thesis have made a research on economic evaluation indicator and method for natural gas cogeneration project and proposed a new evaluation method which includes the costs for construction, production and environmental aspects; firstly, structuring input and output indicators from the perspective of total social costs and benefits according to the characteristic of natural gas cogeneration project. Input indicators include construction costs, production costs and environmental costs and output indicators include environmental benefits and economical benefits resulted from supply of electricity and heat. To make qualitative analysis for benefits which can’t be quantitatively measured. Secondly, establishing economic evaluation model based on DEA and carrying on empirical study via the data of different type of power generation projects, and drawing the conclusion that natural gas cogeneration project has the lowest environmental costs than any other primary energy-fired power projects and has pretty high economical benefits; it has the biggest external benefits and biggest input-output efficiency among all types of power generation projects. Finally, based on the conclusion, this thesis made suggestions for the development of natural gas-fired cogeneration power projects.This thesis put forth a new thinking about the economic evaluation for power generation projects, namely evaluation method shall not subject to the financial evaluation which does not put external costs into consideration and shall internalize external costs as calculating the costs of power generation projects. The evaluation of power generation projects may adopt input-output efficiency.This thesis is aimed at providing important reference for the development of natural gas cogeneration projects and also, providing the basis for decision-making to plan-related institutes, power companies, heat supply companies and natural gas operators and so on.