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Life cycle inventory of power producing technologies and power grids at regional grid level in India

  • LCI METHODOLOGY AND DATABASES
  • Published:
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Abstract

Purpose

Indian electricity production mix, technology level, and local production conditions vary across the states and union territories. This variability is obscured in existing national-level life cycle inventories of Indian power producing technologies and power systems, which potentially leads to inaccurate results from LCA studies that include Indian activities. This study aims to create a consistent regionalized inventory model of Indian power system parameters and to evaluate how that influences life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) calculations.

Methods

Data collection covers state-specific key parameters of domestic power production and distribution, and inter-exchanges among the regional grids and with other countries in 2012–2013. However, such regionalization work faces some data availability challenges. Power plant parameter data (e.g., efficiency, fuel quality, exact technology used) are mostly unavailable on plant level for India; if at all, relevant data are available on a state level. Moreover, local emission data are also mostly unavailable except emissions of CO2. Quantities of other important emissions (NOx, SOx, CH4, CO, PM) are, therefore, calculated based on emission factors from literature.

Results and discussion

Variation in electricity production volumes among the states and regional grids are found notably high. Six states contribute 55% of the national power supply, whereas ten states contribute only 2.1% to the total. Moreover, the five regional electricity grids—Eastern, Western, Southern, Northern, and North-eastern grids—show high variation in production mixes. These differences have a considerable impact on LCIA results. For instance, the contribution to the global warming potential per 1 kWh of electricity supplied to the grid is nearly twice as high in the Eastern grid as in the North-eastern grid. Furthermore, transformation and transmission losses are found to be high in the Indian electricity grids with an average of 17% technical losses along the transmission chain from high voltage to the low voltage.

Conclusions

Hence, we conclude that the inventory data produced in this study on Indian electricity production and distribution at grid level, taking local variations in technology mix and key parameters into account, enables higher accuracy in life cycle assessment studies compared to using average national-level data.

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Notes

  1. The short names of the country are used according to the International Organization for Standards alpha-2 country codes.

  2. India is a federal union consisting of 29 states and 7 union territories which are further subdivided into districts and further into smaller administrative divisions. States are governed by the own elected governments and union territories are governed directly by the Union Government.

  3. The Indian government made a reformation of states to give birth the new state named “Telangana” after 2013 which is out of the temporal boundary (2012–2013) of this study.

  4. Puducherry, Nagaland, Goa, Manipur, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, Tripura, Sikkim, Assam, and Kerala

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Muhammed Noor Hossain, Johan Tivander & Anne-Marie Tillman

  2. Paul Scherrer Institut, Villigen, Switzerland

    Karin Treyer

  3. Ecoinvent Centre, Zürich, Switzerland

    Tereza Lévová & Lucia Valsasina

Authors
  1. Muhammed Noor Hossain
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  2. Johan Tivander
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  3. Karin Treyer
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  4. Tereza Lévová
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  5. Lucia Valsasina
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  6. Anne-Marie Tillman
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Muhammed Noor Hossain.

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Responsible editor: Shabbir Gheewala

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Hossain, M.N., Tivander, J., Treyer, K. et al. Life cycle inventory of power producing technologies and power grids at regional grid level in India. Int J Life Cycle Assess 24, 824–837 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11367-018-1536-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11367-018-1536-7

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