Abstract
Renewable energy technologies are considered essential for climate-change mitigation. However, compared to fossil fuels, their reduced greenhouse gas emissions may come at the cost of increased consumption of water, land and material. So far, these environmental trade-offs have not yet been systematically quantified. Doing so is challenging, because the environmental benefits and impacts of renewable energy installations vary strongly with technological performance as well as spatial and temporal variability in climate. This research aims to quantify the global-scale environmental trade-offs of renewable energy technologies in comparison to their non-renewable counterparts. It includes wind farms, solar power stations, hydropower stations and biomass power stations, thus covering the largest renewable energy sources for electricity production worldwide. The comparison will be based on life-cycle energy use, land use, water consumption, scarce material use, greenhouse gas emissions, and on a more aggregated level, impacts on biodiversity per unit of electricity produced. To account for the influence of variability in technological characteristics and climatic circumstances on the environmental trade offs, the analysis will be done at the level of individual facilities. First, a dataset of well-studied renewable energy facilities will be developed in order to establish environmental scaling relationships that quantify the environmental impacts of renewable energy facilities based on technological characteristics, such as size and technology type. These relationships will then be applied to quantify the environmental impacts of all known present-day facilities as well as planned facilities worldwide. This will be done by using facility-specific information of current and planned renewable energy power stations across the world and long-term, global climate datasets and earth system models. The environmental impacts of the facility-specific renewable power stations will be compared with those of their non-renewable counterparts. Once all the environmental trade-offs are quantified, the distribution of facilities can be planned in a more effective way.
Netherlands