Download Free Irp Methods For Environmental Impact Statements Of Utility Expansion Plans Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Irp Methods For Environmental Impact Statements Of Utility Expansion Plans and write the review.

Most large electric utilities and a growing number of gas utilities in the United States are using a planning method -- Integrated Resource Planning (IRP) - which incorporates demand-side management (DSM) programs whenever the marginal cost of the DSM programs are lower than the marginal cost of supply-side expansion options. Argonne National Laboratory has applied the IRP method in its socio-economic analysis of an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) of power marketing for a system of electric utilities in the mountain and western regions of the United States. Applying the IRP methods provides valuable information to the participants in an EIS process involving capacity expansion of an electric or gas utility. The major challenges of applying the IRP method within an EIS are the time consuming and costly task of developing a least cost expansion path for each altemative, the detailed quantification of environmental damages associated with capacity expansion, and the explicit inclusion of societal-impacts to the region.
Map and graphs.
As part of their long-term planning process, utilities and government agencies are choosing power generation and conservation strategies that will effect environmental interactions for decades to come. In the US, power marketing administrations within the US Department of Energy have a strong influence over the strategies to be implemented in large multi-state regions. Pacific Northwest Laboratories (PNL) prepared environmental impact statements (EIS) for two power marketing agencies, the Western Area Power Administration (Western) and Bonneville Power Administration (Bonneville). The Western EIS assessed the effects of integrated resource planing (IRP) on the public utilities Western serves, while the Bonneville EIS assessed the effects of acquiring new energy resources in the pacific Northwest. The results were found using models that simulated utility systems. In both cases, environmental impacts were reduced when the conservation strategy in question was considered. This paper describes the results of the environmental analyses for the two agencies and compares the results with those of another simplified approach that relies on attributing emissions of new resources based on an extrapolation of existing capacity.
This report is intended as a guide to the use of multi-criteria decision-making methods (MCDM) for incorporating environmental factors in electric utility integrated resource planning (IRP). Application of MCDM is emerging as an alternative and complementary method to explicit economic valuation for weighting environmental effects. We provide a step-by-step guide to the elements that are common to all MCDM applications. The report discusses how environmental attributes should be selected and defined; how options should be selected (and how risk and uncertainty should be accounted for); how environmental impacts should be quantified (with particular attention to the problems of location); how screening should be conducted; the construction and analysis of trade-off curves; dominance analysis, which seeks to identify clearly superior options, and reject clearly inferior options; scaling of impacts, in which we translate social, economic and environmental impacts into value functions; the determination of weights, with particular emphasis on ensuring that the weights reflect the trade-offs that decision-makers are actually willing to make; the amalgamation of attributes into overall plan rankings; and the resolution of differences among methods, and between individuals. There are many MCDM methods available for accomplishing these steps. They can differ in their appropriateness, ease of use, validity, and results. This report also includes an extensive review of past applications, in which we use the step-by-step guide to examine how these applications satisfied the criteria of appropriateness, ease of use, and validity. Case material is drawn from a wide field of utility applications, ranging from project-level environmental impact statements to capacity bidding programs, and from the results of two case studies conducted as part of this research.