the region.27 The 21 countries comprising APEC include Australia, Canada, China, Japan, the
United States, and Russia. According to an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Working Group
(APWG) study in 2001, projects to improve combustion, steam cycle, and O&M required low to
medium costs, and these expenditures were predicted to produce as much as a 3.5% net overall
efficiency improvement.28 These improvements could also result in the largest overall reduction
in CO2 emissions of all the scenarios considered by the APWG study, since lower cost
improvements were more likely to be adopted.
However, if reduction of carbon intensity is the goal (measured in grams of CO2 emission per
kiloWatt-hour of generation), the study found that switching of CFPPs to biomass ranked highest
among the options considered (as biomass was considered carbon neutral), followed by fuelswitching
to natural gas.
A subsequent APWG study in 200529 found that many older power plants in the Asia-Pacific
region were operating well below their design efficiency. However, the study found that replacing
the older CFPPs with new power plants was not practical because the expenditure for a new plant
could not be justified by the improved performance. Instead, efficiency and operational
improvements were seen as a possible alternative considering a range of equipment upgrades and
refurbishment options to various CFPP systems.