Energy production and environment’s safeguard: Towards an optimal compromise

The determination of the minimun energy production cost which allows the conservation of air quality, as defined by Italian legislation, is formulated in this paper as a mathematical programming problem. Air pollution due to productive activities is computed by a simulation model and this allows the estimation of a set of coefficients relating it to the fuel consumption. The linear problem obtained in this way is further simplified in order to reduce the number of constraints to few hundreds, using some knowledge on the pollution dynamics. The method has been implemented on a personal computer and tested on a region of the Piacenza province.