Impact of Facility-Specific Temporal Profiles for Public Power Sector on WRF-CMAQ Simulations

The energy demand is increasing day by day, although the installation and operation of coal-fired power plants slowly fade out throughout the world, it is still increasing in Turkey. Air pollutant emissions from public power sector, mainly composed of power plants contribute significantly to Turkey national totals (70.4% SO2, 38.9% NOx, 9.8% PM2.5). Along with the emission estimation, the temporal and spatial distribution of these emissions are also crucial for accurate simulations with low uncertainty in air quality modeling. Sector-specific profiles are widely used as temporal profiles to input hourly emissions for modeling. In this study, a new temporal profile was established using hourly electricity generation of a large-capacity coal-fired power plant: Afsin Elbistan Power Plant (AEPP). The WRF/CMAQ model was run for two cases; one with sector-specific temporal profile (base case) and another with facility-specific temporal profile (scenario case). EMEP 2018 emissions were used and model was run for 2018 summer months (JJA) with high-resolution 4 × 4 km2 grid size. Temporal profile comparisons for the summer period indicated maximum differences between 00.00 and 07.00 h with higher ratios for scenario case. Day of the week comparison showed consistently high differences on the weekends, especially on Sundays (average of +40.4% for JJA) with base case always allocating lower emissions on Saturdays and Sundays than scenario case. The largest daily differences were observed between 14 and 22 July where the highest was on 22 July (+91%) which were again weekend days. Hourly concentrations over AEPP showed the highest differences in July with scenario case being usually higher. The peak concentrations and concentration differences usually occur around midnight (00.00). The days with the highest hourly differences were on 18 July (1614 ppbV for SO2, 26 ppbV for NO2, and 9 ppbV for VOC) for Layer 7, which is around midnight.