Title: Life cycle carbon dioxide emissions of power generation in China
Authors: Shuhua Li; Zelong Jiang; Zongyang Wu; Zhongwen Zhu
Addresses: School of Automotive and Transportation Engineering, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei 230009, China ' School of Automotive and Transportation Engineering, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei 230009, China ' School of Automotive and Transportation Engineering, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei 230009, China; Midea Refrigeration Division, Hefei 230000, China ' Automotive Research Institute, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei 230009, China
Abstract: Reducing CO2 emissions is one of China's priorities for carbon peaking and carbon neutralisation. To promote low-carbon and sustainable development, it is necessary to calculate the amount of CO2 emissions generated throughout the power generation process and predict China's future thermal power generation. Due to traditional grey models (GM) cannot discriminate the importance of new and old data, in this research, a weighted metabolic grey model (WMGM) is proposed and utilised to predict China's thermal power generation in the next 8 years. The validation MAPE of GM was 1.2776%, whereas the validation MAPE of WMGM was 0.4263%, improving the prediction ability by 66.63%, according to the results. According to the predictions made by WMGM(1, 1), China's share of thermal power generation will fall from 78.0505% in 2012 to 58.1620% in 2030. CO2 emissions will drop from 0.7845 (kg/kWh) in 2012 to 0.5910 (kg/kWh) in 2030 according to the life cycle assessment (LCA) method. The study's findings offer recommendations for changing the energy system and serve as a guide for China in achieving its 2030 carbon peak target.
Keywords: thermal power generation; CO2 emissions; grey predict model; life cycle assessment; LCA; China.
International Journal of Powertrains, 2024 Vol.13 No.4, pp.435 - 453
Received: 17 Nov 2023
Accepted: 09 Oct 2024
Published online: 17 Feb 2025 *