Abstract
The Multifunctional Environmental Energy Tower (MEET) is a single, vertical, stand-alone renewable energy plant designed to decrease the primary energy consumption from fossil fuels, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, to maximize the energy production from renewable sources available in place and to minimize land use. A feasibility case study was performed for the city of Rome, Italy. Several technologies are exploited and integrated in a single system, including a photovoltaic plant, a geothermal plant and a biomass digester for urban organic waste and sewage sludge. In the proposed configuration, the MEET could cover more than 11% of the electric power demand and up to 3% of the space heating demand of the surrounding urban area. An LCA analysis evaluates the environmental impact in a cradle-to-grave approach for two impact categories: global warming (carbon footprint) and land use (land occupation and land transformation). The functional unit is a mix of electric (49.1%) and thermal (50.9%) energy (kWhmix). The carbon footprint is 48.70 g CO2eq/kWhmix; the land transformation is 4.058 m2/GWhmix; and the land occupation is 969.3 m2y/GWhmix. With respect to other energy production technologies, the carbon footprint is lower and similar to the best-performing ones (e.g., co-generation from wood chips); both of the land use indicators are considerably smaller than the least-impacting technologies. A systematic study was finally performed, and possible optimizations of the original design are proposed. Thanks to the modular design, the conceptual idea can be easily applied to other urban and non-urban scenarios.
Highlights
Two of the major outputs from the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are that the consequences of uncontrolled climate change for humans and natural ecosystems are evident and that the anthropogenic impact on the climate system has been increasing in recent years [1,2]
Impacts are computed for the climate change impact category and two land use impact categories
The land occupation is calculated using the selected life-cycle inventory (LCI) results single-issue method [63]; the land transformation is computed considering the area covered by the Multifunctional Environmental Energy Tower (MEET) during its life cycle, excluding the OFMSW and sewage sludge production and collection, since they can be considered as byproducts currently treated as waste
Summary
Two of the major outputs from the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are that the consequences of uncontrolled climate change for humans and natural ecosystems are evident and that the anthropogenic impact on the climate system has been increasing in recent years [1,2]. Limiting climate change will require a substantial and stable reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and strong effort is required, especially for the research and development of innovative technologies and strategies. Mitigation (i.e., the human intervention to reduce the sources or enhance the sinks of greenhouse gases) together with the adaptation to climate change can effectively contribute to the objective of reducing the GHG concentration [5,6,7,8]. The energy supply sector (energy extraction, conversion, storage, transmission and distribution processes) [9] represents the largest contribution to global GHG emissions, and it is characterized by an increasing demand for energy services and a growing share of coal in the global fuel mix.
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