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Electricity consumption saves water at midpoint

Posted: 04 Aug 2016 16:14
by Mara
Hello fellow openLCA people!
I have a question concerning the effect electricity consumption has on water depletion in the LCIA because I find it quite weird:

I am using openLCA 1.5.0 and the elcd databse 3.0. In my model the use of any electricity flow from the elcd database is saving water at the midpoint level. I made a very simple model to show the effect.
If I use 32 kWh to produce the product X, 136m^3 of water are saved - how can that be? To me this makes no sense..
I used several of the energy mix flows to check for differences, e.g. this one: Electricity Mix, consumption mix, at consumer, AC, 115-220V.

Using ReCiPe or ILCD impact assessmnet method at midpoint gives me this "positive" impact, i.e. that electricity consumption saves water.

Does anybody have an idea why that is the case?

Thank you :-)

Mara

Re: Electricity consumption saves water at midpoint

Posted: 04 Aug 2016 21:19
by aciroth
Hi Mara,

this is indeed somewhat surprising but it is as it is provided in the original data set which has an input of -4 m³ water, see screenshots from openLCA and the ELCD database (http://eplca.jrc.ec.europa.eu/ELCD3/res ... =03.00.000).
2016-08-04 21_17_37-Fotos.png
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Maybe due to system expansion calculations.
Hth,
Andreas

Re: Electricity consumption saves water at midpoint

Posted: 05 Aug 2016 11:34
by Mara
Thank you Andreas!

Re: Electricity consumption saves water at midpoint

Posted: 05 Aug 2016 18:06
by aciroth
Update: With the new version of ELCD 3.2 from Nexus you will not get negative results overall, other flows compensate this negative input flow, at least for some water categories - you are writing that you use still version 3.0 of ELCD, so maybe you should move to a newer version. If you have created other processes, you can e.g. export them as JSON and import into your new database.
Best wishes,
Andreas