A low-carbon electricity model: Integrated Resource Strategic Planning and its application

Abstract

With the challenge of climate change, many governments around the world are focusing on reducing emissions of carbon through energy efficiency improvements, particularly in the rapidly-growing electricity demand. There are great potentials in this sector for reducing emissions in both supply-side and demand-side. On the supply-side, thermal power plants are major contributors to CO 2 emissions. Promoting low-carbon power generation such as renewable energy in supply side would reduce emissions greatly in this sector. On the demand-side, improving end-use efficiency would reduce the demand for electricity. Integrated Resource Planning (IRP) which considers both supply-side and demand-side options had been a useful planning process for power supply planning when the electric power industry was dominated by regulated and vertically integrated utilities. However, its effectiveness has been reduced with the restructuring of the power sector around the world, where the selection and investment in generating facilities are left to the unregulated market. The authors propose a low-carbon electricity model: Integrated Resource Strategic Planning (IRSP) as an alternative to IRP in a deregulated power sector. IRSP takes the resource planning process one step higher to the national level. In this paper, using IRSP, the authors demonstrate the tremendous potential for carbon emission improvements on both supply-side and demand-side of the power sector. World electricity generation will be around 20584TWh in 2010 and 31782TWh in 2030 projected by IEO2009. A case study of IRSP for global electricity saving and clean energy generation shows that between 2010 and 2030, the potential for electricity savings in demand side will be about 31361.04 TWh and the CO 2 emission reduction will be about 2.85 billion tons by the IRSP model‥