Wise Energy Investment Decisions--Not Just [kJ out/kJ in]
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Wise Energy Investment Decisions--Not Just [kJ out/kJ in] Lise Laurin EarthShift, 31 Leach Rd, Kittery, ME, 03904 ABSTRACT While the best energy solutions may seem obvious to the LCA community, we often see wind turbines voted down for aesthetics and policy makers leaning toward solutions that show poor return, kilojoule per kilojoule. If we are to move forward with wise energy solutions, we will need to broaden our perspective to include the social impacts that influence policy-makers and communities, creating a decision-system that encompasses both social and environmental impacts. Starting with LCA and Total Cost Assessment, a case study of a biodiesel facility in Vermont begins to incorporate social goals with reduced environmental impacts. We’ll then look at other energy systems and how these decision-making tools might be used to bring policy makers, environmentalists, and communities together making wise energy choices for our future. INTRODUCTION Politicians and the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) community are looking at different energy solutions right now for many reasons. These different communities, however, are coming up with different favored solutions. Each group is looking at a different set of criteria for evaluating energy. If the concerns of the LCA community are to be heard, this community needs to first embrace the concerns of the politicians, to create common ground for discussion.
One of the largest drivers for looking at energy solutions is the continually increasing demand for power, with large populations, such as China and India coming on line. Fossil fuel reserves are becoming more and more difficult and costly to extract. For the US and Europe, there is the belief that reliance on off-shore energy sources can lead to national security issues. Increasingly, around the world, global warming concerns are driving energy decisions. There are a number of alternatives under consideration. For transportation, the top contenders include ethanol, bioethanol, biodiesel, and hydrogen fuel cells. For electricity production there is a wider array of options including, wind, solar PV, clean coal, fuel cells, nuclear, and wood/vegetative scrap. Figure 1 shows a power station which can burn coal, oil, and woody biomass, as an example. Any methodology used to choose between the energy options must be able to incorporate the issues with each as well as handle other options not yet identified.
Figure 1: The author is in a unique position to speak about the social impacts of energy options, with nearly every option less than 15 miles away, or “in her backyard.” This is Schiller Power Station in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which burns oil and coal, but just recently changed one of its boilers over to burn woody biomass. We can learn something about the limitations of using Life Cycle Assessment by looking at the energy options currently in use in Europe. Figure 2 shows the major impacts of seven different electricity generation methods. We see immediately that hydropower has the least impacts. Yet
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