Analyzing the Environmental Impact of Thermal Power Plants on Air Pollution across Taiwan.

Air pollution is a high-profile issue that causes precipitation acidification, water pollution, and building corrosion, negatively affecting human respiratory health. As technology gradually digitalizes, the rise in electricity demand may exacerbate pollution, further impacting the environment and public health. The process of electricity generation emits significant amounts of air pollutants like SO₂, NOₓ, O₃, CO, PM₁₀, and PM₂.₅, which cause acid precipitation and smog that can potentially threaten public health. Among various methods of generating electricity, the thermal power-based method has the most significant impact on air pollution, accounting for 70% of the total, primarily through gas-fired and coal-fired power. To comprehend the environmental impact of electricity generation by the government-operated Taiwan Power Company, this study concentrates on identifying the relationship between electricity consumption, air pollutants, and hydro-meteorological factors. To achieve this aim, two data-driven methods are employed: (1) Complete Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition with Adaptive Noise (CEEMDAN), an improved version of Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD), to extract long-term trends from non-stationary, non-linear data (2) Time-dependent Intrinsic Correlation (TDIC) to visualize and quantify the correlation, illustrating the degree of relationship between two time-series data sets. The CEEMDAN algorithm will decompose data into several Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMF) and one long-term trend of data. Those IMFs represent the changing data in different time scales. Subsequently, this research utilizes each IMF to reconstruct signals and generate wind rose diagrams. With the wind rose diagram, this research can analyze multi-scale distribution properties of wind direction and wind speed that can explore the changing trends of the wind field. By decoding these relationships, this research can better examine the degree of thermal power generation impacts on air pollution and how wind direction disperses air pollutants, providing a high-risk mapping to avoid human activities. Based on Taiwan's geographical address surrounded by the sea, this study can encompass the impacts of anthropogenic factors and natural factors, like monsoons, on air pollution, achieving a more comprehensive analysis. Moreover, integrating these findings and policy implementation enables more sustainable resource management and decision-making.