Combined Prospective Economic and Environmental Assessment of Energy Technologies Using the Example of Hybrid Battery Storage Systems

Abstract

Innovative energy technologies are being developed in the course of the energy transition in order to find more sustainable alternatives to conventional energy technologies. In business decisions, technological alternatives are generally based on the short-term economic performance, often not including costs throughout all life cycle stages. In the context of sustainable energy transitions both economic aspects and environmental impacts should be considered in any evaluation and including all life cycle phases, particularly for energy facilities with a long lifetime. For instance, future technological alternatives which might only marginally fall short to more economically attractive options are likely to be ignored, although they might perform substantially better in the environmental dimension in the long run. MCDA analyses can reveal these trade-offs between economics and environment by integrating life cycle costing (LCC) and life cycle assessment (LCA) approaches. However, only a few open-source LCC tools for energy technologies are available and neither of them are programmed to interact with open-source LCA frameworks. This contribution is to present a Python framework which implements current and prospective LCC analyses for energy technologies together with the Python-based Brightway2 LCA framework. The results of both tools will be combined in an MCDA analysis for a straightforward illustration of trade-offs using a meta framework. This open-source tool will be demonstrated by a case study carried out in the BMWi funded project HyReK 2.0. Including prospective aspects, a hybrid battery storage system combined with a power-to-heat module will be compared to other systems providing frequency containment reserve. The results show that neither of the alternatives ranked highest in the combined assessment and that a trade-off decision has to be accepted. In the next steps, different stakeholder perspectives will be integrated in the assessment.