Effectiveness of SO2emission control policy on power plants in the Yangtze River Delta, China-post-assessment of the 11th Five-Year Plan.
Facing the air pollution problems in China, emission control strategies have been implemented within the framework of national Five-Year Plan (FYP). According to the lack of post-assessment studies in the literature, this study assessed the effectiveness of the SO2emission control policies on power plants after the 11th FYP (2006-2010) by modeling emission control scenarios. The idealized emission control policy (the PS90 scenario with assumption of 90% SO2emission reduction from power plants) could reduce the SO2and SO42-concentrations by about 51 and 14%, respectively, over the Yangtze River Delta region. While the actual emission control condition (the P2010 scenario based on the actual emissions from power plants in 2010) demonstrated that the actual reduction benefits were 30% of SO2and 9% of SO42-. On the city scale, the P2010 scenario imposed positive benefits on Shanghai, Nanjing, Nantong, and Hangzhou with SO2reductions of about 55, 12, 30, and 21%, respectively, while an 11% increase of SO2concentration was found in Ningbo. The number of days exceeding China's National Ambient Air Quality Standard of Class I daily SO2concentration was estimated to be 75, 52, 7, 77, and 40 days for Shanghai, Nanjing, Nantong, Ningbo, and Hangzhou under the real SO2control condition (P2010). The numbers could be decreased by 16, 11, 2, 21, and 11% if the control effect reaches the level of the PS90 scenario. This study serves as a scientific basis to design capable enforcement of emission control strategies in China in the future national plans.
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, 37996, USA.
Jiani
J
Tan
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, 37996, USA. jsfu@utk.edu.
Joshua S
JS
Fu
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, 37996, USA.|Department of Environmental Science and Engineering, Fudan University, Shanghai, 200433, People's Republic of China.
Kan
K
Huang
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, 37996, USA.
Cheng-En
CE
Yang
Department of Environmental Science and Engineering, Fudan University, Shanghai, 200433, People's Republic of China.
Guoshun
G
Zhuang
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, 37996, USA.
Jian
J
Sun
D000393:Air Pollutants / Q000032:analysis; D000397:Air Pollution / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence*; D002681:China; D002947:Cities; D003198:Computer Simulation; D004784:Environmental Monitoring; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D011210:Power Plants; D045483:Rivers; D013458:Sulfur Dioxide; D014887:Weather
D000393:Air Pollutants; D013458:Sulfur Dioxide
11th Five-Year Plan; Air quality modeling; Post-assessment; SO2 emission control; WRF/CMAQ; Yangtze River Delta