Prospective assessment of energy technologies: a comprehensive approach for sustainability assessment

Abstract

Background A further increase in renewable energy supply is needed to substitute fossil fuels and combat climate change. Each energy source and respective technologies have specific techno-economic and environmental characteristics as well as social implications. This paper presents a comprehensive approach for prospective sustainability assessment of energy technologies developed within the Helmholtz Initiative “Energy System 2050” (ES2050). Methods The “ES2050 approach” comprises environmental, economic, and social assessment. It includes established life cycle based economic and environmental indicators, and social indicators derived from a normative concept of sustainable development. The elaborated social indicators, i.e. patent growth rate, acceptance, and domestic value added, address three different socio-technical areas, i.e. innovation (patents), public perception (acceptance), and public welfare (value added). Results The implementation of the “ES2050 approach” is presented exemplarily and different sustainability indicators and respective results are discussed based on three emerging technologies and corresponding case studies: (1) synthetic biofuels for mobility; (2) hydrogen from wind power for mobility; and (3) batteries for stationary energy storage. For synthetic biofuel, the environmental advantages over fossil gasoline are most apparent for the impact categories Climate Change and Ionizing Radiation—human health. Domestic value added accounts for 66% for synthetic biofuel compared to 13% for fossil gasoline. All hydrogen supply options can be considered to become near to economic competitiveness with fossil fuels in the long term. Survey participants regard Explosion Hazard as the most pressing concern about hydrogen fuel stations. For Li-ion batteries, the results for patent growth rate indicate that they enter their maturity phase. Conclusions The “ES2050 approach” enables a consistent prospective sustainability assessment of (emerging) energy technologies, supporting technology developers, decision-makers in politics, industry, and society with knowledge for further evaluation, steering, and governance. The approach presented is considered rather a starting point than a blueprint for the comprehensive assessment of renewable energy technologies though, especially for the suggested social indicators, their significance and their embedding in context scenarios for prospective assessments.

Weighting factor elicitation for sustainability assessment of energy technologies

“…Within this study, levelized total costs (LTC) was used as an economic indicator, cf. Haase et al , 11 comprising CAPEX and OPEX. Furthermore, in this LCC no external costs, taxes, or subsidies were considered.…”

“…48 Then, percentages of domestic value added were estimated for each cost component and summed up to the fraction of domestic value added of total costs. 11,48 A detailed description of the method can be found in Harzendorf et al 48…”

Multi-criteria decision analysis for prospective sustainability assessment of alternative technologies and fuels for individual motorized transport

“…End-of-life phase is not comprehensively included due to lack of information for certain recycling processes. For sustainability assessment, the indicator set developed within the Helmholtz Initiative Energy System 2050 (Haase et al 2022) is used together with the MCDA method Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOP-SIS) (Hwang and Yoon 1981). Through sensitivity analysis, the influence of different weightings as well as of uncertain (prospective) input data on the overall results is discussed.…”

“…It consists of the three elements "environmental", "economic" and "social" assessment in Fig. 1 Energy System 2050 (ES2050) approach for sustainability assessment of energy technologies (adapted from Haase et al 2022) accordance with the triple-bottom line model of sustainability (cf. Haase et al 2022).…”

“…1 Energy System 2050 (ES2050) approach for sustainability assessment of energy technologies (adapted from Haase et al 2022) accordance with the triple-bottom line model of sustainability (cf. Haase et al 2022). Starting point of the assessment is the definition of system boundaries and the characterization of the process chains.…”