Abstract :
Realizing and installing renewable energy plants have an environmental “footprint” that has to be evaluated to quantify the real
impact of renewable technologies on the environment. Nowadays, the most important tool to evaluate this impact of a product is the
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA).
The aim of this work is to present a Life Cycle Assessment of an innovative solar technology, the molten salt concentrating solar
power (CSP) plant combined with a biomass Back-Up Burner, developed by Italian Research Centre ENEA and able to produce clean
electricity by using solar energy. The Life Cycle Assessment was carried out by means of the SimaPro7 software, one of the most used
LCA software in the world.
In the second part of the study the environmental performance of the CSP plant was compared with these of conventional oil and gas
power plants.
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