Renewables-Integrated Energy Systems Can Provide Electricity at Lower Cost with Less Environmental and Social Damage

• Published in: ACS sustainable chemistry & engineering 2022-10, Vol.10 (40), p.13390-13401
• Main Authors: Agrawal, Anubha, Bakshi, Bhavik R., Kodamana, Hariprasad, Ramteke, Manojkumar
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 2168-0485; 2168-0485
• DOI: 10.1021/acssuschemeng.2c03629

Renewables are clean but intermittent resources, whereas nonrenewables are cheaper and reliable but polluting resources. Optimally combining renewablessolar PV modules, wind turbines, and fuel cellswith traditional nonrenewablescoal and power from the grid―in a renewables-integrated energy system (RIES) can provide sustainable power for meeting the growing energy needs. However, such RIES optimization is a complex problem owing to the presence of multiple objectives, dynamic variations in load, and intermittency of renewables. Therefore, we propose a novel sustainability framework that optimizes the combination of different resources in RIES to obtain the best trade-off between cost of electricity, cost to society accounted for mortalities from emissions, and cost to ecosystems accounted for land use, water use, and CO2 emissions. The optimized RIES satisfying hourly load profile at three differentially populated locations in India show that the electricity cost can be reduced while reducing harm to society and to ecosystems. Our optimized designs show about 111% reduction in mortalities compared to the base case. Further, we find that the benefits of optimized RIES in terms of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and reducing human mortality are highest in densely populated regions, which coincidentally suffer from worse air quality.