Quantifying the cost of leaving the Paris Agreement via the integration of life cycle assessment, energy systems modeling and monetization

Abstract

Current energy systems models focus on cost minimization with a bound on some greenhouse gas emissions. This limited environmental scope can lead to mixes that are not consistent with our sustainable development. To circumvent this limitation, we here make use of the concept of monetization and life cycle assessment to quantify the indirect costs of electricity generation in the design of energy systems. Applying our approach to the United States, we found that the indirect costs of electricity generation could be reduced by as much as 63% by meeting the Paris Agreement. Consequently, the total opportunity cost (i.e., direct and indirect costs) of withdrawing from the Paris Agreement and continuing with the current mix would be as high as 1103 ± 206 billion USD2013 in 2030 (i.e., 6% of the United States gross domestic product in 2017). By optimizing the direct and indirect cost of electricity generation concurrently, we found an optimal ecological solution that attains total economic savings compared to the Paris Agreement mix of as much as 373 ± 164 billion USD2013 in 2030. Our work highlights the need to extend the environmental policies that govern energy systems beyond the direct greenhouse emissions to consider other critical environmental criteria.

Energy Sustainability Analysis (ESA) of Energy-Producing Processes: A Case Study on Distributed H2 Production

“…One of the most critical factors is the energetic footprint of materials and chemicals, even though materials enter into the system as matter, its production and/or assembly has an energetic cost considered in the ESA as energy fund-resource, in many cases at different geographical locations. For example, an installed Photovoltaic System in Europe but produced abroad has an energetic burden to society in energy terms, however, the economic analysis includes the disparity in salaries and services costs between countries, which can mislead sustainability studies [57].…”

A Conceptual Review on Using Consequential Life Cycle Assessment Methodology for the Energy Sector

“…Several authors clarified that the PEM and LCA coupling is suitable to study one or two closely related sectors with 5 to 20 products [43,44]. This is true for all reviewed case studies which applied PEM and LCA, with focus on one sector of energy production [22,[29][30][31][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51], or two sectors of energy production and waste management [52,53] or energy production and agriculture/forest/crop growing [39,41,[54][55][56][57][58][59][60][61][62].…”

A Review on Consequential Life Cycle Assessment in the Power Sector

“…All of the reviewed case studies expanded the product system boundary by either increasing unit processes or including relevant products and co-products. Some studies made it very clear on the inclusion of extended unit processes [22][23][24][25][26], while others did not clearly identify the unit processes of a product system's life cycle [27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34]. In terms of products and co-products, the system boundary was extended to at least two products in all reviewed studies.…”

“…Examples of the mutatis mutandis assumption can be found in several studies [23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][40][41][42][43][44][45] (Refer to Table 2). In these studies, the marginal products or technologies were identified, with determined affected scales.…”