Life cycle sustainability assessment of electricity options for the UK

Abstract

SUMMARY The UK electricity mix will change significantly in the future. This provides an opportunity to consider the full life cycle sustainability of the options currently considered as most suitable for the UK: gas, nuclear, offshore wind and photovoltaics (PV). In an attempt to identify the most sustainable options and inform policy, this paper applies a sustainability assessment framework developed previously by the authors to compare these electricity options. To put discussion in context, coal is also considered as a significant contributor to the current electricity supply. Each option is assessed and compared in terms of its economic, environmental and social implications, using a range of sustainability indicators. The results show that no one technology is superior and that certain trade‐offs must be made. For example, nuclear and offshore wind power have the lowest life cycle environmental impacts, except for freshwater ecotoxicity for which gas is the best option; coal and gas are the cheapest options (£74 and 66/MWh, respectively, at 10% discount), but both have high global warming potential (1072 and 379 g CO2 eq./kWh); PV has relatively low global warming potential (88 g CO2 eq./kWh) but high cost (£302/MWh), as well as high ozone layer and resource depletion. Nuclear, wind and PV increase some aspects of energy security: in the case of nuclear, this is due to inherent fuel storage capabilities (energy density 290 million times that of natural gas), whereas wind and PV decrease fossil fuel import requirements by up to 0.2 toe/MWh. However, all three options require additional installed capacity for grid management. Nuclear also poses complex risk and intergenerational questions such as the creation of 10.16 m3/TWh of nuclear waste for long‐term geological storage. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Review of Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment and Potential for Its Adoption at an Automotive Company

“…A rather elaborate assessment method was introduced by Stamford and Azapagic [64] who used 43 indicators grouped into sustainability sections (techno-economic, environmental, social) to assess possible future energy mixes in the UK. They followed up their assessment with a revised method, employing 16 indicators that followed LCA for environmental impacts but own deliberations regarding economic and social impacts to identify the most sustainable energy mix for the UK in 2070 [65].…”

“…The main research needs in this rather diverse set of publications were identified to be more testing of the developed methods [63,64,66], refinement and ranking of indicators [61,70], and the incorporation of input-output analysis [60].…”

Systems Thinking for Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment: A Review of Recent Developments, Applications, and Future Perspectives

“…Several other key financial indicators such as gross value added, profit, import dependency, levelized cost, profit, etc. can be used to extend the depth of the economic analysis [59,89]. So far, the applications of social indicators are also not studied sufficiently.…”

Environmental Impacts of Shale Gas in the UK: Current Situation and Future Scenarios

“…[1,32] The water pushes its way through the casing perfora- Figure 1. The life cycle of shale gas and other electricity options considered in the study (adapted from Stamford and Azapagic [30] ). "Gas" represents the life cycles of shale, conventional gas and LNG.…”