Abstract:
Life cycle analysis for
different energy sources
Alfred Voss, Head of Institute for Energy Economics, Stuttgart
Total resource consumption, including the environmental resources, is an important aspect with respect to the sustainability of energy supply chains and energy systems. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) provides the conceptual framework for a comprehensive comparative evaluation of energy supply options with regard to their resource requirements as well as the health and environmental impact. Full scope LCA considers not only the emissions from plant operation, construction and decommissioning, but also the environmental burdens and resource requirements associated with the entire lifetime of all relevant upstream and downstream processes within the energy chain.
As modern energy technologies increasingly tend to reduce the direct environmental burdens of the energy conversion process, the detailed assessment of all life cycle stages of the fuel chain is a prerequisite for a comprehensive assessment of their resource intensity and relative sustainability. The paper describes the results of LCA analyses for state of the art heating and electricity systems as well as of advanced future systems. Total costs are used as a measure for the overall resource consumption