Environmental Sustainability Benchmarking of Low-Carbon Energy Technologies

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Today's energy system threatens climate stability and causes significant environmental problems in the form of health effects and ecological impacts. The challenge is to reduce these environmental impacts while ensuring an adequate supply of clean, afford able energy to the world's growing population. Energy efficiency, alternative energy sources and new conversion technologies are required to meet these goals. New energy technologies can also bring with themselves environmental costs and resource requirem ents, and these costs should be adequately considered in energy and climate policy, but are poorly understood so far. In this study the large-scale implementation of mitigation technologies according to energy scenarios will be modeled in terms of the req uired infrastructure, land, water, fuel, material and other input requirements, and associated emissions/wastes. The methodology for this work will be adapted from an ongoing EU FP7 project, Prospective Sustainability Assessment of Technologies. The impac ts will be evaluated on a global level and where appropriate through regional case studies. The work will proceed in four steps: 1. Identification of critical issues in dialogue with stakeholders and experts 2. Development of modeling methods for the lif e-cycle impacts of future energy systems 3. Specify technology parameters for the impact modeling based on a literature review 4. Modeling of impacts of the wide-scale adoption of the technologies in the benchmark year 2050 in accordance to mitigation sce narios The work will be organized to support and take advantage of the PI's role as working group chair in the UNEP Resource Panel and as a lead author in the Energy Systems chapter of the forthcoming IPCC 5th assessment report.