Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) Under the CDM standard, the calculation of carbon certificates for a solar power plant might look like this: Calculate Emissions Reduction: Assume the solar power plant has a capacity of 1 MW and generates 8,000 MWh of electricity per year.
The first part of the conversion is efficiency of the boiler and combustion. For this example we take 88 % on an HHV basis that is the normal range for a well-optimized power plant. b. Second part is the steam cycle efficiency. Modern Rankine cycle, adopted in coal fired power plants, have efficiencies that vary from 32 % to 42 %.
These credits represent the reduction in carbon dioxide emissions caused by renewable energy production. Let’s calculate carbon credit for a 1 MW solar power plant which produces 8,000 MWh of electricity per yearbased on the standard listed above. Clean Development Mechanism (CDM)
An example of how a solar panel would pay back its energy and carbon production cost extremely quickly, would be a French or German-made panel (being manufactured with electricity generated from nuclear power - low carbon) being installed in China, where most of the energy is generated via coal or gas, which is high carbon.
Transportation costs, regional influences and government taxes are also part of the cost. Coal trader’s web sites give base prices in the international market. We take a coal price of around 65 $ / Ton. A 100 MW unit produces 100,000 units of electricity. So the cost of coal per unit of electricity is (3497/100,000) 3.5 cents per unit.
One Kw is 3600 kJ/hr. If the energy conversion is 100 % efficient then to produce one unit of electricity we require 3600 kJ. Since coal has a heat value of 20,000 kJ/kg, for producing one kw.hr we require (10765 / 20000) 0.538 kg of coal. This translates to (0.538 x 100 x 1,000) 53800 kg/hr (53.8 T/hr) of coal for an output of 100 MW.