Comparative Life Cycle Environmental Impact Assessment of Renewable Electricity Generation Systems: A Practical Approach Towards Europe, North America and Oceania

Abstract

This paper addresses the comparative environmental impacts of four different renewable-power plants, namely solar, wind, biomass and hydropower plants. Life-cycle impact analysis has been carried out by Institute of Environmental Sciences (CML), Eco-indicator 99, Cumulative Energy Demand (CED) and Ecopoints 97 methods, using the Ecoinvent database and SimaPro software. The superiority of this work is creating a comprehensive life-cycle inventory following a reliable global database, assessing the impacts for about 10 midpoint impact categories and three endpoint indicators, and taking account of the fossil-fuel-based energy consumption rate of each plant. The results show that photovoltaic power plants have the highest environmental impacts in the types of ozone layer depletion, fresh water aquatic ecotoxicity and marine aquatic ecotoxicity, while biomass plants impact on the categories of abiotic depletion, global warming, photochemical oxidation, acidification, and eutrophication. Moreover, the wind power plants have the more significant environmental effect on human toxicity and terrestrial ecotoxicity types. Overall, hydropower plants are found to be much more environment-friendly than other renewable electricity generation systems.