ECOLOGICAL AND ECONOMIC ASSESSMENT OF THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE USE OF RENEWABLE ENERGY SOURCES

Abstract

The article is devoted to the problem of an environmental-economic assessment of consequences of using renewable energy sources. The existing system for assessing environmental-economic consequences of energy production can be applied only to traditional energy sources — combined heat and power plants (CHP plants), thermal power plants (TPP), and atomic power plants, since it is unviable to apply it for renewable energy sources. The reason lies in the peculiar features of renewable energy sources — they do not use exhaustible energy resources for the purpose of energy generation and have a small minimum size of a power station, which makes renewable energy sources more mobile and available for the use in the private sector of economy. This article proposes a methodology of an environmental-economic assessment of the consequences of energy generation from renewable energy sources, which takes into account the features of renewable energy sources use in comparison to traditional ones. In this paper, we analyze shortcomings of the existing methodology for assessing consequences of harmful substances emissions into the atmosphere and propose our own methodology. It includes a life cycle theory of an energy product, which allows to identify environmental-economic consequences at every stage of the life cycle of an energy product and to assess them. For an objective assessment we used statistical data and existing calculations from domestic scientists on a correlation between the number of diseases and volume of harmful substances emissions into the atmosphere. The methodology allows to assess and compare environmental-economic consequences of the development of a particular energy source in relation to other sources. Despite the generally accepted opinion that there are no environmental and economic consequences of the use of renewable energy sources, this paper proves that renewable energy sources have such an impact at different stages of their life cycle. Research findings and calculations in this paper allow to use existing mathematical tools to develop optimal models for the energy sector development of Ukraine. The proposed methodology can be applied to other countries in order to identify its shortcomings and develop further this methodology of assessment.