Anthropogenic heat from power generation
Cooling Singapore’s technical report studies the anthropogenic heat from Singapore’s power generation and evaluates potential future emissions with the usage of electromobility across the island.
Anthropogenic heat (AH) emissions are an important factor in driving the Urban Heat Island effect (UHI) and is related to global warming. As such, the power generation sector is a notable source of anthropogenic heat, external pagegenerating over 5000 ktoe of cogeneration and waste heat in Singapore in 2016. There are different types of electricity generation technologies such as fossil fuel-based generation, nuclear energy, and hydropower and Singapore uses thermal power plants almost entirely. It is key to note that thermal power plants are the principal source of heat in the power generation sector.
The technical report by David Roman Kayanan, Dr Jimeno Fonseca, and external pageProf. Leslie Norford from Cooling Singapore studies the AH emissions of Singapore’s power generation sector and evaluates the potential future emissions with the increased usage of electromobility across the entire island. The researchers developed a power plant dispatch model to downscale the total heat released by the power sector in 2016.
The power plant dispatch model took electricity demand and fuel prices as inputs and was based on an energy-only model of the National Electricity Market of Singapore. The model is capable of calculating the dispatch, fuel consumption, cogeneration heat and waste heat streams of each plant.
Using data from a previous study on AH emissions in the transportation sector, the researchers simulated a scenario of fully electrified road transportation in Singapore. Compared to using vehicles on petroleum, this additional electricity demand means a reduction of heat on the roads by a factor of six. More heat is then emitted at distant and efficient cogeneration plants. Overall, the estimated reduction in total anthropogenic heat is 1473 ktoe, or about 7% less than in 2016.
For full details, read the report external page"Anthropogenic Heat of Power Generation in Singapore: analyzing today and a future electromobility scenario" published by the Singapore-ETH Centre.