ecoinvent Forum Archive

 Dear all,

I am going through the documentation of electricity production of hard coal, lignite and all the available technologies for Germany. I am having a hard time understanding the calculation for "items of power plants" for each technology. For instance, in the case of hard coal, the math relation used is 1.3E-12*FactorMJ_KWh. I understood that 1.3E-12 is calculated based on a power plant 500 MW, 4000 full load hours and lifetime 150,000 h, efficiency 0.373. However, I can not reproduce this value. It is there something that I am missing? Similarly situation with electricity production of lignite.Many thanks and kind regards.

Dear User,

To answer this question please take at look at the ecoinvent v2 report “06_VI_Kohle.pdf” available through ecoQuery, after logging in to v2 of ecoinvent database. The exchange comment of “hard coal power plant” in the “electricity production, hard coal, DE” mentions that the calculation is based on the 500MW power plant. The initial dataset for energy from hard coal was based on “hard coal burned in power plant” (in MJ) and not as the electricity produced. The value of 1.30E-12 represents the fraction of the power plant “used” to burn 1 MJ of hard coal and is used in all hard coal burning datasets representing a European average. From Tab. 9.8 and Fig. 9.2 we can derive the European average efficiency used (0.351).

Thus:

500’000 kW * 150’000 h * 3.6 MJ/kWh = 2.7e11 MJ produced over the lifetime of the powerplant

1/(2.7e11 MJ / 0.351) = 1.30E-12 MJ-1

In the current dataset this value is converted to hard coal power plant per kWh with a country-specific efficiency as can be seen in the parameters of the dataset.

I hope this answers your question.

Best regards,

Johannes Müller, Junior Data Analyst, ecoinvent Association