Abstract

The energy supply chain is the backbone of industrialised societies, but it is also one of the leading causes of global environmental burden. Life cycle management (LCM) and life cycle assessment (LCA) are increasingly being used in combination with energy system optimisation models (ESOM) to better represent the energy sector and its dynamics, and facilitate better decision-making. The integration of ESOM and LCA can enable powerful analyses, but not without difficulties. In this chapter, we review studies linking a well-known bottom-up ESOM (TIMES) with LCA databases and identify the principal challenges and how they have been addressed. One of the main integration challenges is the identification of equivalent processes between life cycle inventories and ESOM databases: the mapping problem. Other concomitant issues such as double counting and parameter consistency have been identified and are also investigated.

Highlights

  • The economic growth observed in the last century has been heavily correlated with a sharp rise in energy use, improving living conditions for many, and resulting in large environmental damage [1]

  • There is a small but increasing number of studies combining life cycle assessment (LCA) and energy system optimisation models (ESOM) [3–12], ESOM best practices start to include Life cycle management (LCM) practices, such as goal and scope definition or the use of data quality indicators as a way to quantify epistemic uncertainty [13]

  • The integration challenges identified in this book chapter stem from our efforts linking the North American TIMES Energy Model (NATEM) with life cycle inventories (LCIs) [24, 25] and reading of associated literature

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Summary

Introduction

The economic growth observed in the last century has been heavily correlated with a sharp rise in energy use, improving living conditions for many, and resulting in large environmental damage [1]. The energy sector is responsible for nearly two-thirds of global greenhouse gas emissions [2]. There is an urgent need to transform the energy supply chain, decarbonising electricity supply

Vaillancourt Esmia Consultants, Montreal, Canada
Energy System Models
Advantages of Integrating ESOM and LCA
Literature Review
LCA-TIMES Integration Challenges
Mapping TIMES-LCA Processes
Double Counting
Integrating Life Cycle Emissions in the Optimisation Problem
Technological Representativeness
Dealing with Multifunctional Processes
Discussion and Conclusions
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