Environmental Impact of Electricity Generation Technologies: A Comparison between Conventional, Nuclear, and Renewable Technologies

Giambattista Guidi (), Anna Carmela Violante and Simona De Iuliis
Additional contact information
Giambattista Guidi: Energy Technologies and Renewable Energy Sources Department, ENEA Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development, Via Anguillarese 301, 00123 Rome, Italy
Anna Carmela Violante: Energy Technologies and Renewable Energy Sources Department, ENEA Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development, Via Anguillarese 301, 00123 Rome, Italy
Simona De Iuliis: Energy Technologies and Renewable Energy Sources Department, ENEA Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development, Via Anguillarese 301, 00123 Rome, Italy

Energies, 2023, vol. 16, issue 23, 1-33

Abstract: The transformation of the energy sector, based on the development of low-carbon technologies, is essential to achieve climate neutrality. The Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a powerful methodology for assessing the environmental impact of energy technologies, which proves to be a useful tool for policy makers. The paper is a review of the main LCA studies of power generation systems performed over the past ten years aiming at comparing the energy technologies to identify those with the lowest impact on the environment, evaluated in terms of gCO 2eq /kWh emissions. Screening criteria were established to include only studies of the highest qualitative significance. The authors decided to assign greater weight to emission values reported in more recent studies. For nuclear and renewable energy technologies, most of the emissions are related to the pre-operational phases. Notably, both nuclear and wind technologies, along with other renewable sources throughout their entire life cycle, exhibit significantly lower and less variable emissions compared with conventional gas- and coal-fired technologies.

Keywords: electricity generation technologies; LCA; environmental impact; nuclear energy; renewable energy; coal- and gas-fired plants (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/16/23/7847/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/16/23/7847/ (text/html)

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:gam:jeners:v:16:y:2023:i:23:p:7847-:d:1290963

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Agatha Cao

More articles in Energies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().