Carbon Reduction Efficiency Of Low-carbon Projects For The Power Industry

With the aggravation of global warming,nations all over the world pay more attention to the reduction of greenhouse gas such as carbon dioxide.For a long time,electricity industry depend on coal and oil heavily and constantly,producing much carbon dioxide.Therefore,electricity industry becomes one of the main areas worldwide to control the emission of carbon dioxide.In recent years,renewable energies such as wind power,water power and solar power have been exploited in electricity industry.Some technologies like carbon capture and storage(CCS)are also adopted to reduce the emission of carbon dioxide in conventional power plants.These measures and technologies play a significant role in achieving low-carbon development goals of electricity industry and relieving greenhouse effect.There has been a lot of researches focusing on carbon emission of electricity industry,most of which are based on the perspective of different areas or countries to compare their emission of carbon dioxide or evaluate various factors that influence carbon emission.In this paper,73 power plants are chosen from wind power plants,water power plants,polar power plants,biomass energy power plants,nuclear power plants and power plants with CCS technology to make an evaluation on relative efficiency of carbon dioxide reduction of different projects.DEA method combined with meta-frontier concept was adopted to evaluate the carbon reduction efficiency of different projects under group frontiers and meta frontier respectively,which takes carbon reduction capacity gap and management level of different technologies in power plants into consideration.The result reveals that 1)Nuclear power plants show the highest relative efficiency in carbon reduction while facing some constraints from safety,stability and so on.Therefore,there is some improvement room from both technology itself and management level for increasing carbon reduction efficiency.2)Biomass energy power plants and conventional power plants with CCS technology have a high efficiency in carbon reduction,while there is still room for improvement in management level to improve their carbon reduction efficiency further.3)Although wind power,water power and solar power have been exploited in electricity industry for a long time,they still have relatively low efficiency of carbon reduction,which means they have much potential for improvement in carbon reduction efficiency.According to the results,further analyses focusing on projects themselves and carbon reduction technologies were made and some measures suggestions on improving carbon reduction efficiency were put forward.In the end of this paper,future hot research areas about carbon reduction of electricity industry were discussed.