Introduction:

Nowadays have emerged important tools to quantify the potential environmental impacts of processes, products and services. Among them emergy, a concept based in thermodynamics, the theoretical principles of ecology and system energetics, have gained popularity due to it allows among other things to assess the relevance of human work and services in the same framework.

Objective:

The objective of this investigation is to assess the potential environmental impact of the electricity production in Cuba taking as a case of study the Carlos Manuel de Céspedes Power Plant located in Cienfuegos.

Materials and Methods:

To do this an emergy analysis was carried out which required an analysis of documents to identified the unit emergy values of the main flows that control the dynamics of the system analyzed.

Results and Discussion:

The transformity estimated for electricity is 7.9925 E+05 seJ/J which is in the range for similar systems The emergy yield ratio (EYR) shows a high dependence from the system of non-renewable and imported resources from economy being the fuel over 90 % of the emergy flow consumed. The environmental loading ratio (ELR) reveals a high impact to the environment which is the reason why the emergy sustainability index (ESI) indicates the unsustainability of the system in the long run.

Conclusions:

This shows the necessity to exploit other forms of generation based in renewable sources being the biomass attractive due to Cuban perspective.

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