Life Cycle Assessment of a high temperature molten salt concentrated solar power plant

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. 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.