Life Cycle Assessment of Environmental Impacts and Total Cost of Power Cable

Abstract

For responding the national demand of energy conservation and emission reduction (ECER) and promoting the green purchase of power equipments, it’s highly of importance to perform the analytic process of environmental impacts and total cost in lifetime for power equipments. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is an analytic approach which completely supervises the concerned objective within its life cycle. In this paper the life cycle is hypothetically divided into three main phases, respectively, the production phase, the operation phase and the recycling phase. On the basis of LCA, this study develops a model regarding the environmental impact analysis and total cost calculation for power cable within its life cycle. This model computes the emission level of main pollutants at each stage and illustrates the trend of total cost change with respect to changeable power load parameters. The experimental research indicates that the developed model is practically useful and rational with conclusions. In terms of environmental impacts of power cable, the effect from the production phase mostly lies in the discharge of abundant waste water. And the effect from the operation phase mainly concentrates upon the energy consumption and the emission of greenhouse gas. However, the effect from the recycling phase is very slight. Meanwhile, as for the perspective of total cost of power cable, the operating cost increases obviously as the power load arises.