Benchmarking Cleaner Production Performance of Coal-fired Power Plants.pdf

Abstract—Benchmarking cleaner production performance is an effective way of pollution control and emission reduction in coal-fired power industry. A benchmarking method using two-stage super-efficiency data envelopment analysis for coal-fired power plants is proposed – firstly, to improve the cleaner production performance of DEA-inefficient or weakly DEA-efficient plants, then to select the benchmark from performance-improved power plants. An empirical study is carried out with the survey data of 24 coal-fired power plants. The result shows that in the first stage the performance of 16 plants is DEA-efficient and that of 8 plants is relatively inefficient. The target values for improving DEA-inefficient plants are acquired by projection analysis. The efficient performance of 24 power plants and the benchmarking plant is achieved in the second stage. The two-stage benchmarking method is practical to select the optimal benchmark in the cleaner production of coal-fired power industry and will continuously improve plants’ cleaner production performance. Keywords—benchmarking, cleaner production performance, coal-fired power plant, super-efficiency data envelopment analysis I. INTRODUCTION HE coal-fired power industry is an important part of the electric utilities and about 80% electricity generation is from coal-fired power plants at present in China. In 2007, the installed capacity of the thermal power was 554420 MW, accounting for 77.7% of the total; and 82.9% of the electricity production was from thermal power generation, with 76% from coal-fired power plants, which resulted in 34% coal consumption of the total coal output in China [1]. The dominant position of coal in the primary energy structure led to the generating pattern of coal-oriented power industry. The Energy Research Institute of China forecasted that by 2020 Chinese installed capacity of electric power would reach 961000 MW, with 600000 MW from the coal-fired pow