An exergy-based study on the relationship between costs and environmental impacts in power plants

Exergy-based (exergetic, exergoeconomic and exergoenvironmental) analyses, are used for designing, assessing and improving energy conversion systems. In an exergoeconomic analysis, thermodynamic inefficiencies represented by exergy destruction are used in combination with investment costs to calculate the "cost-optimal" layout of a plant. Analogously, in an exergoenvironmental analysis, the aim is to minimize the total environmental impact of a plant. Until today exergoeconomic and exergoenvironmental analyses have been used as separate and distinct tools and the improvement of a plant has been considered in terms of the reduction of either costs or environmental impact. To simultaneously decrease the investment costs and the component-related (manufacturing or construction -related) environmental impacts, their relationship with exergy destruction must be studied in parallel. This paper examines the relationship between exergoeconomic and exergoenvironmental data under various plant operating conditions. A combined-cycle power plant is analyzed and options for a simultaneous improvement from the thermodynamic, economic and environmental viewpoints are discussed. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.Tatiana Morosuk gratefully acknowledges the financial support from the Berliner Programm zur Förderung der Chancengleichheit von Frauen in Forschung und Lehre. Fontina Petrakopoulou would like to thank the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration (grant agreement nº 600371), the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (COFUND2014-51509) and Banco Santander