Climate Change And Environmental Threats - 1260 Words

Climate change and environmental threats came more into focus in the last years and presently they represent a large challenge for the society. This means that environmental considerations have to be integrated into a number of different decisions made by businesses, individuals, policymakers and public administrators (Finnveden et al. 2009). Environmental Systems analysis is the field that ‘attempts to find supply technology systems solutions to these challenges’ (Chalmers University, 2012) In the last years, many tools and methods have been developed to evaluate the environmental impacts of different systems, such as Life Cycle Assessment, Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), Environmental Risk Assessment (ERA), Strategic†¦show more content†¦Environmental effects include the materials and energy resources required to make the product, and also, the wastes and emissions produced in the process. It is often called as ‘cradle to grave’ view of seeing resource consumption (Pehnt 2006). Results of LCAs can be valuable for recognizing areas with large environmental impact, and for evaluating and improving designs. Therefore, in order to identify the environmental performances, for example, emissions and energy savings, from different type of renewable energy, a full evaluation from ‘cradle to grave’ should be done. LCA is then has been the method to measure the total impact of resource consumption. LCA is a multistep technique for calcu lating the lifetime environmental impact of a product or service. The International Standard ISO 14040 described the levels of an LCA as follows: †¢ Goal and scope definition †¢ Inventory analysis †¢ Impact assessment †¢ Interpretation of results Figure 7.1 Phases of a LCA study (ISO, 2006) 7.1 Life cycle assessment and micro CHP systems There are only a few studies at present that focus on LCA of SOFC implemented systems (Staffell Green 2012; Giannopoulos Founti 2011a; Pehnt 2001; Pà ¶schl et al. 2010; Patterson et al. 2011; Lunghi et al. 2004). The majority of them focus on the use phase of the SOFC unit, considering only natural gas as a fuel. Staffell et al (2012) carried out a carbon footprint assessment of a SOFC based on domestic CHP with the current embedded