How do I change the energy grid mix in a process?

Question

How do I change the energy grid mix in e.g. the process "concrete production 3MPa, RNA only | concrete, 35MPa | APOS S? I would like to find out how much environmental impact improvement it would have on concrete production if the energy came predominantly from windopower.

Answer 1

I cannot think of an easy solution for this in a system-process based database. If you are using unit-processes, you can simply replace the electricity-related input flows with specific ones for wind energy.

Update:

The energy source for the incoming energy flow is the provider. In the newest version of openLCA (1.8) you can right click on a flow and select Open provider (in the older versions just check the process in the Provider column). To figure out what energy source is being used, just trace back the supply chain either via the linked providers or the model graph of the product system (also the inventory and contribution tree should give you a hint on this).

If you do so you will end up at market for electricity, high voltage with four different electricity, high voltage flows provided by the following processes

Just remodel the supply chain with wind energy by providing energy input from a electricity production, wind process instead of the default processes. I highly recommend not to change the standard ecoinvent processes but rather to create copies so that you do not mess up your database.

I hope this helps.

Comments

Please add additional information to you question to the question at the top and not in comments (https://ask.openlca.org/37/tour-how-does-ask-openlca-work?show=38#a38) Thanks! I have updated my answer and hope it helps :)