Renewable Myths and Non-Renewable Realities about Energy Portfolio Management
Abstract
Still majority of world's energy is generated from traditional energy sources, and less attention has been paid to the green energies. Energy portfolios are mostly developed by including only the economic factors in mind and not sustainability aspects. Fossil fuels are generally cheaper, with more greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, while green energies often cost more and take more water and land footprint at the expense of less GHG emissions. In this research, aside from the usual economic factors, the environmental, technical, and social metrics are considered for the energy portfolio management and a new framework is presented to determine the most sustainable energy blend. Using the Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT), an optimization problem is formed and solved with the goal of maximizing resource use efficiency and minimizing the associated risk, while the technical feasibility and other constraints are considered to ensure the formation of viable and pragmatic energy portfolios. Lastly, the current state of energy production is compared to the sustainable portfolios and required changes towards sustainability are discussed. The primary results show the potential of geothermal, wind, and solar energies as the most sustainable options, and surprisingly nuclear power was found to be one of the more sustainable non-renewable technologies. The major foci of this research are American Southeast States. Reliance of these states on natural gas and nuclear energies, despite the lack of nuclear and fossil fuel sources, is considered to be potentially alleviated with more green energy portfolios. By adapting new energy plans, it is expected that more sustainable energy markets could be formed in this region as well.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFMGC43H1408G
- Keywords:
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- 0495 Water/energy interactions;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 0299 General or miscellaneous;
- GEOHEALTH;
- 1630 Impacts of global change;
- GLOBAL CHANGE;
- 6309 Decision making under uncertainty;
- POLICY SCIENCES & PUBLIC ISSUES