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Life Cycle Assessment in Renewable and Sustainable Energy
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Life Cycle Assessment in Renewable and Sustainable Energy

A special issue of Energies (ISSN 1996-1073). This special issue belongs to the section "B: Energy and Environment".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 14 February 2025 | Viewed by 3073

Special Issue Editors

Dr. Giuseppe Cardellini

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Vlaamse Instelling voor Technologisch Onderzoek (VITO), Boeretang 200, 2400 Mol, Belgium
Interests: sustainability assessment; LCA; renewable energy; wood; biomaterials
Dr. Daniele Costa

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
VITO – EnergyVille, Unit Smart Energy and Built Environment (SEB), Thor Park 8310, 3600 Genk, Belgium
Interests: life cycle assessment; life cycle sustainability assessment; energy systems; renewable energy
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Dr. Maarten Messagie

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
ETEC Department & MOBI Research Group, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Pleinlaan 2, 1050 Brussels, Belgium
Interests: renewable energy; LCA; carbon footprint; electric vehicles

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Many efforts are being made to reduce anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In order to decarbonise the energy sector and replace fossil fuels, many new renewable technologies have been and are being developed. To ensure their sustainability, methods and tools to measure and compare the environmental impacts and benefits of the developed technologies are needed. This is particularly relevant for technologies conceived to mitigate climate change, but that obviously impact also other areas of concern and spheres of sustainability. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a well-established tool used to assess the sustainability performances of different renewable energy sources useful to help companies and policy makers to select the most sustainable energy source for each specific goal and understand where they can be improved. The main aim of this Special Issue us to give an overview of different renewable energy systems to understand the environmental impact of producing energy through the analysis over their life cycle of different generation sources. All contributions using LCA to assess past, present and future sustainability performances of renewable energies are welcome.

This Special Issue aims to invite colleagues to submit their recent research on the sustainability assessment of renewable energy technologies with life cycle assessment.

Original articles, reviews and case studies focusing on following topics are welcome:

  • LCA of renewable energy production technologies (solar, wind, hydro, bioenergy, etc.)
  • LCA of renewable energy storage technologies (batteries, Power-to-X, etc.)
  • Methodological advances in the context of renewable energy (e.g prospective LA, dynamic LCA, regionalized LCA, etc.)
  • Trade-off between climate change and other environmental impacts of renewable energies
  • Use of LCA together with other methodologies/tools (TEA, optimization, MFA, PSE, LCC, S-LCA, etc.)
  • Life Cycle Optimization of renewable energies production and use
  • LCA for eco-design of renewable energies

Dr. Giuseppe Cardellini
Dr. Daniele Costa
Dr. Maarten Messagie
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Energies is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • renewable energy
  • sustainability
  • Life Cycle Assessment
  • environmental analysis tools

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Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

21 pages, 10163 KiB  
Article
Photovoltaic Manufacturing Factories and Industrial Site Environmental Impact Assessment
by Peter Brailovsky, Lorena Sanchez, Dilara Subasi, Jochen Rentsch, Ralf Preu and Sebastian Nold
Energies 2024, 17(11), 2540; https://doi.org/10.3390/en17112540 - 24 May 2024
Viewed by 1003
Abstract
Life cycle inventories (LCIs) and life cycle assessments (LCAs) of photovoltaic (PV) modules and their components focus on the operations of PV factories, but the factories and industrial site product and construction stages are either not or only partially tackled. This work contributes [...] Read more.
Life cycle inventories (LCIs) and life cycle assessments (LCAs) of photovoltaic (PV) modules and their components focus on the operations of PV factories, but the factories and industrial site product and construction stages are either not or only partially tackled. This work contributes through the bottom-up, model-based generation of LCIs and LCAs for setting up a vertically integrated 5 GWp/a PV industrial site, including the manufacturing of silicon ingots, wafers, solar cells, and PV modules, on a 50 ha greenfield location. Two comparative LCAs are performed. The first compares the annualized environmental impacts of the developed LCI sets with four existing inventories in the Ecoinvent v3.8 database. The second comparative LCA explores the environmental impact differences concerning the industrial site when using different building systems for the factories. Here, the reference system with a steel structure is compared with two alternative building systems: precast concrete and structural timber. The results show that the wafer, cell, and module factories’ annualized environmental impacts with the Ecoinvent LCIs are strongly overestimated. For the ingot factory, the opposite result is identified. The impacts of all four factories show reductions of between 11.7% and 94.3% for 14 of the 15 impact categories. High mean environmental impact shares of 79.0%, 78.2% and 79.2% for the steel, precast concrete and timber structural building systems, respectively, are generated at the product stage. The process and facilities equipment generates 54.2%, 54.4% and 58.2% of the total product and construction stages’ mean environmental impact shares. The proposed alternative timber building system reduces the environmental impacts in 14 of the 15 evaluated categories, with reductions ranging from 1.1% to 12.4%. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Life Cycle Assessment in Renewable and Sustainable Energy)
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25 pages, 8213 KiB  
Article
Eco-Efficiency as a Decision Support Tool to Compare Renewable Energy Systems
by Dominik Huber, Ander Martinez Alonso, Maeva Lavigne Philippot and Maarten Messagie
Energies 2023, 16(11), 4478; https://doi.org/10.3390/en16114478 - 1 Jun 2023
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1496
Abstract
Even though eco-efficiency (EE) is already applied to various energy systems, so far, no study investigates in detail the hourly, marginal and seasonal impacts of a decentralized energy system. This study assesses the hourly EE of the Research Park Zellik (RPZ), located in [...] Read more.
Even though eco-efficiency (EE) is already applied to various energy systems, so far, no study investigates in detail the hourly, marginal and seasonal impacts of a decentralized energy system. This study assesses the hourly EE of the Research Park Zellik (RPZ), located in the Brussels metropolitan area for 2022 composed of photovoltaic installations, wind turbines and batteries. A cradle-to-grave life cycle assessment (LCA) to identify the carbon footprint (CF) and a levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) calculation is conducted. An existing design optimization framework is applied to the RPZ. Consumption data are obtained from smart meters of five consumers at the RPZ on a one-hour time resolution for 2022 and upscaled based on the annual consumption of the RPZ. As the EE is presented as the sum of the CF and the LCOE, a lower EE corresponds to an economically and environmentally preferable energy system. In a comparative framework, the developed method is applied to two different case studies, namely, (i) to an energy system in Vega de Valcerce in Spain and (ii) to an energy system in Bèli Bartoka in Poland. The average EE of the RPZ energy system in 2022 is 0.15 per kWh, while the average EE of the Polish and Spanish energy systems are 1.48 and 0.36 per kWh, respectively. When analyzing four selected weeks, both the LCOE and CF of the RPZ energy system are driven by the consumption of the Belgian electricity grid mix. In contrast, due to the very low LCOE and CF of the renewable energy sources, in particular wind turbines, the RPZ energy system’s EE benefits and lies below the EE of the Belgium electricity grid mix. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Life Cycle Assessment in Renewable and Sustainable Energy)
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