The trade-off between socio-environmental awareness and renewable penetration targets in energy transition roadmaps

Aina Maimó-Far, Víctor Homar, Alexis Tantet and Philippe Drobinski

Applied Energy, 2024, vol. 355, issue C, No S0306261923017610

Abstract: Recent years have seen Sustainable Development Goals mark the way towards a sustainable future and put the growth of renewable energy sources in the spotlight. This increase, led by PV and wind technologies, will be necessary to meet renewable penetration targets in upcoming decades. However, these sources require vast amounts of land, a limited resource affecting other Sustainable Development Goals such as ecosystem protection or food production. This article explores the land–energy nexus through the minimization of the system total cost that incorporates a form of suitability for land occupation. Three differentiated regimes appear under a changing suitability cost, with a gap of 70% penetration between the two extremes, and with very high suitability costs unable to meet future objectives given their cap at around the 35% penetration mark. The intermediate approach presents the best fulfillment of Sustainable Development Goals overall, with an increase between 15 and 30% with respect to the other regimes. Existing development plans for the Spanish system point towards this midway approach, a sign of their commitment to sustainability. This study shows that a balanced consideration of land and energy should be prioritized, as the negative effects that arise in a biased approach outweigh the benefits.

Keywords: Renewable energy deployment; Land sustainability; Land–energy nexus; Sustainable development goals; Ecosystem services; Energy system cost; Multi criteria decision analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261923017610
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:appene:v:355:y:2024:i:c:s0306261923017610

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/405891/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... 405891/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.apenergy.2023.122397

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Energy is currently edited by J. Yan

More articles in Applied Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().