Chapter 2 - Methodological Issues

Abstract

Publisher Summary In assessing the relative health and environmental impacts of photovoltaic and alternative technologies, several methodological problems arise. These include establishing the basis for proper allocation of social costs, the incomparabilities of different types of social costs and the impossibility of making value-free overall comparisons, the constraints on the displacement of social costs associated with one energy technology by those of another, and the difficulty of accounting for social costs indirectly related to the use of a given energy technology. This chapter discusses these methodological problems. The first methodological issue is a normalization problem stemming from the fact that sunlight is an inconstant source of energy. While fossil and nuclear facilities may be operated as continuously as is technically feasible, solar power installations are limited by variations in insolation, including diurnal, seasonal, and weather-induced var0iations. Because of this, social costs cannot be assessed on the basis of installed peak-generating capacity. Instead, it is useful to prorate effects over the electrical energy produced. The second methodological problem in comparing energy technologies is that different technologies have qualitatively different impacts and thus may not be directly comparable. The third methodological problem is that deployment of one energy technology must be seen as displacing use of another. Accounting for this raises the allocation and commonality issues above, and incomplete consideration may give misleading results. The fourth problem that arises in the assessment of any energy technology is that there are important underlying and antecedent social costs that may be less evident than the direct effects of the technology.