Reducing your carbon footprint makes good sense. It casts a bright light on energy efficiency, operational cost streams and business processes, challenging the status quo from asset design to disposal. Guidance on carbon accounting for water companies in preparing their investment plans has recently been revised and published by UKWIR, offering options for a consistent approach.
Yet the outlook on economic incentives for carbon mitigation is uncertain. Renewables Obligation Certificates will cease in 2017 and the level of support provided by feed-in tariffs is being regularly revised. Constant changes to carbon and energy costs also complicate estimating the cost-benefit of proposed carbon abatement projects.
WRc (with the support of water companies) has developed a carbon abatement strategy scenario modeller (CASSM). This is a methodology and associated spreadsheet-based tool to help answer a number of relevant questions, including how water companies can compare abatement options, and how they can consider different future scenarios and constraints from different economic perspectives.
The modeller comprises templates to estimate benefits from a range of carbon abatement options, including: water efficient devices; pump replacement or refurbishment; and aeration system upgrades. These templates follow the latest government guidance for accounting greenhouse gas emissions and carbon costs and include default parameters that can help at an early stage in the estimation of costs and savings.
Once summary details (such as costs and greenhouse gas emissions estimations) of the candidate abatement projects have been entered, benefits can be compared from a direct economic perspective, or they can include social and environmental costs and benefits. CASSM produces tabular and graphical outputs to aid the user in refining the abatement projects to investigate further. These outputs include the familiar marginal abatement cost curve, which orders projects according to their cost-effectiveness of abating one tonne of carbon.
The following questions can be answered for a given set of potential projects:
· how much carbon could an abatement strategy (set of abatement projects) save?
· how can I achieve my carbon reduction target most cost-beneficially?
· how much will my proposed carbon abatement strategy cost?
· how much carbon can I abate within my budget?
The modeller also includes the option of comparing different scenarios according to, for example, changing energy prices, carbon prices or government incentive schemes. This shows how sensitive the projected costs are to those parameters and will determine the tipping points for policy options to be cost-effective.
Finally, a key strength of the system is its ability to determine at what point in a given planning horizon the benefits of specific emissions reduction strategies would be maximised. It also allows the user to investigate the financial and carbon benefits from additional projects once the initial target has been reached.
Mark Kowalski is a climate change consultant and Line Poinel a carbon analyst at WRc
This article first appeared in Utility Week’s print edition of 26th October 2012.
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