A qualitative approach to economic-environment dispatch-treatment of multiple pollutants

The authors describe the principles and suggest a methodology for expanding the dispatch of electrical power production systems from involving a pure minimum cost dispatch to also including environmental objectives. The approach is qualitative in that no attempt is made to assign a specific monetary value to environmental impact, but rather to maintain the physical value of the impact through the decision process. However, the initial relative weights assigned to environmental impact in the methodology are based on the many recent attempts to monetize environmental damage. The main contribution of the approach is to analyze how dispatch changes as a function of the total environmental weight and as a function of the relative weighing of individual environmental insults, e.g. SO₂/bin, NO_x and CO ₂. The methodology is illustrated with a sample production system involving environmental cost estimates from major US studies