Integrated life-cycle assessment of electricity-supply scenarios confirms global environmental benefit of low-carbon technologies

By Edgar G. Hertwich, Thomas Gibon, E. Bouman, Anders Arvesen, Sangwon Suh, G. Heath, J. Bergesen, Andrea Ramírez, M. Vega, Lei Shi. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2014

711 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Significance Life-cycle assessments commonly used to analyze the environmental costs and benefits of climate-mitigation options are usually static in nature and address individual power plants. Our paper presents, to our knowledge, the first life-cycle assessment of the large-scale implementation of climate-mitigation technologies, addressing the feedback of the electricity system onto itself and using scenario-consistent assumptions of technical improvements in key energy and material production technologies. Decarbonization of electricity generation can support climate-change mitigation and presents an opportunity to address pollution resulting from fossil-fuel combustion. Generally, renewable technologies require higher initial investments in infrastructure than fossil-based power systems. To assess the tradeoffs of increased up-front emissions and reduced operational emissions, we present, to our knowledge, the first global, integrated life-cycle assessment (LCA) of long-term, wide-scale implementation of electricity generation from renewable sources (i.e., photovoltaic and solar thermal, wind, and hydropower) and of carbon dioxide capture and storage for fossil power generation. We compare emissions causing particulate matter exposure, freshwater ecotoxicity, freshwater eutrophication, and climate change for the climate-change-mitigation (BLUE Map) and business-as-usual (Baseline) scenarios of the International Energy Agency up to 2050. We use a vintage stock model to conduct an LCA of newly installed capacity year-by-year for each region, thus accounting for changes in the energy mix used to manufacture future power plants. Under the Baseline scenario, emissions of air and water pollutants more than double whereas the low-carbon technologies introduced in the BLUE Map scenario allow a doubling of electricity supply while stabilizing or even reducing pollution. Material requirements per unit generation for low-carbon technologies can be higher than for conventional fossil generation: 11–40 times more copper for photovoltaic systems and 6–14 times more iron for wind power plants. However, only two years of current global copper and one year of iron production will suffice to build a low-carbon energy system capable of supplying the world's electricity needs in 2050.

Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5f64933ac830b420435e70ea100bd4fda6590a84

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Citations in the corpus

Systems Thinking for Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment: A Review of Recent Developments, Applications, and Future Perspectives (2017, methodology): “[117] also constructed a hybrid LCA model using the EXIOBASE database as a global MRIO database.”
Evaluating the causes of cost reduction in photovoltaic modules (2018, neutral): “Continued PV deployment could help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and other pollution from energy systems (Hertwich et al., 2015), and contribute to climate change mitigation (Trancik and Cross-Call, 2013).”
Dynamic Energy Return on Energy Investment (EROI) and material requirements in scenarios of global transition to renewable energies (2019, background): “EnU wear : assuming that the energy used for decommissioning electricity plants is 10% of the energy required for its construction [86], the dynamic expression of the EnU for decommissioning power plants would thus be:”
Two sides of the same coin: consequential life cycle assessment based on the attributional framework (2016, background): “In accounting for a changing system, dynamic LCA (Collinge et al., 2013) createsmultiple life cycle inventories (LCIs) that represent the systemindifferent times (see, e.g (Hertwich et al., 2015)).”
Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment: What Is It and What Are Its Challenges? (2016, methodology): “…2013b ; Zamagni 2012 ; Zamagni et al. 2013 ; Pesonen and Horn 2013 ; Kucukvar and Tatari 2013 ; Kucukvar et al. 2014a , b ) and some even address (Hertwich et al. 2014 ) typical ‘deepening’ topics such as the need for comprehensive uncertainty assessment and methods for dealing with rebound…”
An overview of energy planning in Iran and transition pathways towards sustainable electricity supply sector (2019, background): “Data related to environmental and social criteria for each type of technology [56, 79-82]”
Global Sustainability Accounting—Developing EXIOBASE for Multi-Regional Footprint Analysis (2014, background): “While coal clearly has the largest impact across most indicators (also seen in [77], biomass, considered by many a partial solution to the climate change issue, embodies other significant types of environmental impacts—identifying the potential for problem shifting.”
Metal supply constraints for a low-carbon economy? (2018, positive): “This is in line with the conclusions of Elshkaki and Graedel (2013) and a detailed LCA study of Hertwich et al. (2015) on low-carbon technologies.”
Assessment of wind and solar power in global low-carbon energy scenarios: An introduction (2017, background): “…studies on prospective life-cycle assessment of energy technologies suggest that wind and solar energy are subject to fewer sustainability concerns than other low-carbon power supply options, such as carbon capture and storage, nuclear or hydro-power (Berrill et al., 2016; Hertwich et al., 2015).”
The Material Stock–Flow–Service Nexus: A New Approach for Tackling the Decoupling Conundrum (2017, background): “The material and energy repercussions of a future global low-emission electricity system were found to be significant, but manageable [161].”
A critical view on the current application of LCA for new technologies and recommendations for improved practice (2020, background): “A good example of this is the work of Hertwich et al. (2015) and Berril et al. (2016) who perform ‘integrated life cycle assessment of long-term, wide-scale implementation of electricity generation from renewable sources’ (Hertwich et al., 2015) using IEA scenarios.”