Analysis of methodological difference in the assessment of environment externalities for energy production
The purpose of the project has been, based on existing estimates of external costs, to recommend conditions methodologies to use in the future to get a homogene monetisation of the external, environmental costs for different fuel cycles.
In the light of existing assessments of externalities in connection with various fuel cycles, the objective of this project is to recommend future use of background and methods to ensure a more homogeneous monitoring of environmental external effects for each fuel cycle. Assessment of externalities could from part of the estimation of which energy technologies should be developed in the future for environmental reasons. The fact that various studies present different results makes such uses difficult. A recommendation of methods to present more homogeneous assessments of externalities would give a more firm basis for future decisions. In order to propose guidelines for assessing and monitoring externalities, a detailed comparison of various studies is carried out. On this basis the project will comprise the following tasks, 1) A summary of the studies to be analysed. 2) A calculation of a case of current interest based on the various studies. 3) An illustration of the consequences of the use of various methods. 4) An illustration of the consequence of calculating externalities from a top-down or a bottom-up point of view. 5) A comparison of the methods used, as well as the consequences for the results. 6) Clarification of the backgrounds and methods to be used in the future. The results of the project will be published in various international magazines, and are expected to be used nationally as well as internationally to set up criteria for a direct comparison between future assessments of externalities
During the last few years, externalities related to power production technologies have been calculated making use of different methodologies. The external costs may turn out to be vary different for the same fuel cycle depending on the methodology that has been used to assess the externalities. The project has given a review of different valuation issues, which are used in different externality studies and focuses on why the numbers often are different for the same fuel cycle, using different methodologies for assessment of the externalities. Importance has been attached to health effects, being the dominating effects in the external costs. 8 studies have been chosen for futher analysis and comparison in order to show the variation in external costs. The comparison shows the importance of possessing knowledge of which kind of methodologies have been used, which impacts are included etc. to explain why the numbers vary so much in different studies for the same fuel cycle. It is quite important if politicians use externalities to assess the importance of different kinds of energy technologies, or externalities are used by the electricity utilities to choose between different technologies in capacity building, that they use external costs for the technologies based on the same approach calculating the same impacts and using same monetary values of dose-response functions. As an example a comparison has been madke for three studies using different methodologies. The external costs are estimated for the same reference plant using the dispersion models, dose-response functions, impacts and monetary values from the three studies. Comparing the results, it becomes clear that the impacts included in the studies as well as the monetary values and the dose-response functions used to calculate the impacts are quite important. Another important issue is the location of the plant, as differences in population size and differences in background levels of the emissions are quite important parameters, when utilising dispersion models for externality estimations
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