Analysis of the synergistic effects of air pollutant emission reduction and carbon emissions at coal‐fired power plants in China

Abstract Due to ongoing urbanization and industrialization, the energy and electricity demand and consumption are rapidly growing in China, resulting in large air pollutant and greenhouse gas emissions. The coal‐fired power industry is a key to achieving synergistic reduction of air pollutant and carbon emissions. This paper quantifies and compares synergistic effects of technology and policy reduction measures in the coal‐fired power industry. Using 2158 coal‐fired power generators of different types at 833 coal‐fired power plants in 24 Chinese provinces as research samples, this study quantifies and assesses the synergistic effects of structural and technical emission reductions at coal‐fired power plants through top‐down analysis of structural emission reduction and bottom‐up analysis of technical emission reduction. Comparing the synergy coefficients of both types of emission reduction measures, it is determined that structural emission reduction has a significant positive synergistic effect on energy consumption, pollutant and carbon emissions, with no extra emissions and energy consumption. On the other hand, technical emission reduction results in the negative synergistic effect of CO 2 emissions due to electric power consumption and chemical reactions emissions in end‐of‐pipe measures of emission control, which demonstrated that prevalent desulfurization measure WFDG synergistically led to 0.688 tons of CO 2 and 5.132 MWh electric power consumption for 1 ton of SO 2 removed. Therefore, the structural emission reduction is an important means for multi‐target energy conservation and emission reduction. It is necessary for technical emission reduction to reduce related negative synergistic effects while enhancing target pollutant removal.