Comparison of the Environmental Impact of Substations

Abstract

Objective. Substations are built in a wide variety of places such as in mountains and cities. In many cases, these outdoor substations are built in mountain areas. A switchgear installed in an outdoor substation may be either a gas insulated switchgear（GIS）that uses SF₆ gas as an insulating medium or an air insulated switchgear（AIS）that uses air as an insulating medium. Since the GIS insulates SF₆ gas well, the GIS is smaller than the AIS. In this study, we compared environmental impacts of GIS and an old type AIS assuming they are used in a 145kV substation built in a mountain area based on LIME2 method.

Results and Discussion. Through the comparison, we quantified the environmental impact of the life cycle of each substation. When the integration result and the characterization result in terms of global warming were compared, the environmental impact of the substation using the GIS was 19% of that of the substation using the old-type AIS according to the consolidation result and 38% according to the characterization result.

Conclusions. This result suggests that when comparing facilities that use land in very different ways, it is desirable that the environmental impact on biodiversity and primary production be assessed in addition to global warming. It is desirable, therefore, that biodiversity and primary production data be prepared and improved.