1703229 (Jaramillo). This project will advance the field of life cycle assessment (LCA) by demonstrating a consequential LCA framework that incorporates the constraints of operating the power system and thus will allow for more appropriate evaluation of the environmental impacts of novel energy technologies. While this project will focus on energy storage, the model can be applied to other technologies like advanced solar systems, carbon capture and sequestration, electric vehicles, advanced nuclear technology, etc. The focus on energy storage also provides additional broader impacts. Although energy storage can have a transformative effect of the power system, the studies about the benefits of storage have been focused on single services and have suggested that there are not enough economic incentives to support deployment of such application of storage technologies. This project will include a comprehensive analysis of multi-purpose storage deployment and, by identifying the multiple benefits of such deployment strategies, the results can then be used to inform the development of market and regulatory frameworks that guarantee storage providers are properly compensated for all these benefits. Finally, this project will also include the development of a database of environmental impacts from raw material extraction, manufacturing, and end-of-life of different energy storage technologies, which will be available for other researchers to use. Efforts to disseminate the results of the research will also support the broader impacts of the project.
This project will provide a methodological contribution to the life cycle community by demonstrating the need for a better representation of the unique technical constraints of the power system. It will also provide a framework that can be applied in future analyses of the increasingly complex power system. This project draws knowledge from different fields of engineering: it requires methods developed by the industrial ecology and life cycle assessment community, but it also makes use of more complex methods from power systems engineering than have been used by these communities. Research outcomes include an open source power system model for life cycle assessment; a model for evaluating multi-purpose operations of energy storage; a database of energy storage technologies and associated life cycle impacts; robust set of scenarios for storage deployment to support decision-making; and a database of end-of-life requirements for energy storage technologies. .
