Life Cycle Assessment of a High Temperature Molten Salt Concentrated Solar Power Plant

The well-known world energetic matter, mainly due to the worldwide growing energy consumption gone with a reduction of oil and gas availability, and to the environmental effects of the indiscriminate use of fossil fuels in our economy, is leading to the development of clean innovative technologies for the reduction of GHG emissions and the creation of a more sustainable economic structure worldwide. But, 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). To this aim, several impact categories are defined; among these the most important are the Global Warming, the Abiotic Depletion, the Eutrophication, the Acidification, the Land Use and the Human toxicity. 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, 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. It is worth assess that these types of software are an indispensable tools for leading LCA studies. 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.