⚡ 🔌 Our paper on the dynamic environmental impacts of European electricity generation has been published in Energy Conversion and Management! 🔌 ⚡
We have developed hourly profiles of the environmental impacts of electricity generation for the five largest electricity consumers in the EU - Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Poland - and made them available. Our main findings are:
▫ The results vary significantly in most impact categories depending on the prevailing electricity generation pattern.
▫ LCA studies should not only be based on the environmental impacts of domestic electricity generation but should also consider cross-border electricity flows.
▫ It is recommended that dynamic electricity mix models be implemented in LCA studies that examine product systems with time-varying electricity consumption, like electric heating systems or electric car charging.
▫ The dynamic LCA electricity models can also be used to determine the potential for environmentally optimized operations.
This paper results from a collaboration between the Technical University of Munich (Professorship of Regenerative Energy Systems) and the Politecnico di Milano (Renewable Heating and Cooling Lab). Without the valuable contributions of all co-authors, this work would not have been possible: Jacopo Famiglietti, Elke Schropp, Mario Motta, and Matthias Gaderer.