Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697, USA.
Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering, University of Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1, Canada.
Environ Int. 2019 Mar;124:420-430. doi: 10.1016/j.envint.2019.01.029. Epub 2019 Jan 22.
Exposure to ambient particulate matter (PM) caused an estimated 4.2 million deaths worldwide in 2015. However, PM emission standards for power plants vary widely. To explore if the current levels of these standards are sufficiently stringent in a simple cost-benefit framework, we compared the health benefits (avoided monetized health costs) with the control costs of tightening PM emission standards for coal-fired power plants in Northeast (NE) Brazil, where ambient PM concentrations are below World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines. We considered three Brazilian PM (PM refers to PM with a diameter under x micrometers) emission standards and a stricter U.S. EPA standard for recent power plants. Our integrated methodology simulates hourly electricity grid dispatch from utility-scale power plants, disperses the resulting PM, and estimates selected human health impacts from PM exposure using the latest integrated exposure-response model. Since the emissions inventories required to model secondary PM are not available in our study area, we modeled only primary PM so our benefit estimates are conservative. We found that tightening existing PM emission standards yields health benefits that are over 60 times greater than emissions control costs in all the scenarios we considered. The monetary value of avoided hospital admissions alone is at least four times as large as the corresponding control costs. These results provide strong arguments for considering tightening PM emission standards for coal-fired power plants worldwide, including in regions that meet WHO guidelines and in developing countries.
暴露于环境细颗粒物（PM）在 2015 年导致全球约 420 万人死亡。然而，发电厂的 PM 排放标准差异很大。为了在简单的成本效益框架内探讨这些标准的现行水平是否足够严格，我们比较了在巴西东北部（NE），那里的环境 PM 浓度低于世界卫生组织（WHO）标准的情况下，收紧燃煤电厂 PM 排放标准的健康效益（避免货币化的健康成本）与控制成本。我们考虑了三种巴西 PM（PM 是指直径小于 x 微米的 PM）排放标准和一个更严格的美国环保署标准。我们的综合方法模拟了来自公用事业规模发电厂的每小时电网调度，分散了由此产生的 PM，并使用最新的综合暴露-反应模型估计 PM 暴露对选定人类健康的影响。由于我们研究区域的二次 PM 排放清单不可用，因此我们仅对一次 PM 进行建模，因此我们的效益估计是保守的。我们发现，在我们考虑的所有情况下，收紧现有的 PM 排放标准所带来的健康效益都超过了排放控制成本的 60 倍以上。仅避免住院治疗的货币价值就至少是相应控制成本的四倍。这些结果为考虑在全球范围内收紧燃煤电厂的 PM 排放标准提供了有力论据，包括在符合世卫组织标准的地区和发展中国家。
