Abstract
Abstract. This paper, which focuses on emissions from China's coal-fired power plants during 1990–2010, is the second in a series of papers that aims to develop a high-resolution emission inventory for China. This is the first time that emissions from China's coal-fired power plants were estimated at unit level for a 20-year period. This inventory is constructed from a unit-based database compiled in this study, named the China coal-fired Power plant Emissions Database (CPED), which includes detailed information on the technologies, activity data, operation situation, emission factors, and locations of individual units and supplements with aggregated data where unit-based information is not available. Between 1990 and 2010, compared to a 479 % growth in coal consumption, emissions from China's coal-fired power plants increased by 56, 335, and 442 % for SO2, NOx, and CO2, respectively, and decreased by 23 and 27 % for PM2.5 and PM10 respectively. Driven by the accelerated economic growth, large power plants were constructed throughout the country after 2000, resulting in a dramatic growth in emissions. The growth trend of emissions has been effectively curbed since 2005 due to strengthened emission control measures including the installation of flue gas desulfurization (FGD) systems and the optimization of the generation fleet mix by promoting large units and decommissioning small ones. Compared to previous emission inventories, CPED significantly improved the spatial resolution and temporal profile of the power plant emission inventory in China by extensive use of underlying data at unit level. The new inventory developed in this study will enable a close examination of temporal and spatial variations of power plant emissions in China and will help to improve the performances of chemical transport models by providing more accurate emission data.
Highlights
Bottom-up emission inventories, which are compiled from activity rates and emission factors, provide crucial information for understanding the variability of atmospheric compositions and for regulating climate and air quality policies
Our study suggests that the average NOx emission factor slightly decreased at an annual rate of 1 % from 1990 to 2005 with increasing LNB penetrations (Table 4)
The higher uncertainty range of the PM emission estimates is dominated by the uncertainties in the unabated emission factors and the efficiencies of PM removal facilities
Summary
Bottom-up emission inventories, which are compiled from activity rates and emission factors, provide crucial information for understanding the variability of atmospheric compositions and for regulating climate and air quality policies. The current understanding of anthropogenic emissions in China is insufficient because of a lack of underlying data such as detailed activity rates and local measured emission factors (Zhao et al, 2011). This paper is the second in a series that aims to reduce these uncertainties and to improve the spatial and temporal resolution of bottom-up emission inventories in China. The first paper developed a high-resolution emission map for on-road vehicles (Zheng et al, 2014), and this paper focuses on coal-fired power plants.
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