This title appears in the Scientific Report : 2020 
Integrating Life Cycle Assessment into the electric model Stella: A case for Germany, IEK-STE Juelich Forschungszentrum
Benitez, Alicia (Corresponding author)
Wulf, Christina
Systemforschung und Technologische Entwicklung; IEK-STE
2020
LCIC 2020, Berlin (Germany), 2020-08-26 - 2020-08-28
Conference Presentation
Assessment of Energy Systems – Addressing Issues of Energy Efficiency and Energy Security


The foresight of the future electricity demand implies to be prepared for a wide range of possibilities. To this end, energy systems models provide different scenarios for electricity mixes. However, energy system models base the analysis from a technical and economic perspective. Although there are initiatives that include environmental criteria, they mostly focus on carbon dioxide emissions. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) allows a quantitative analysis of the environmental performance of systems, providing indicators that address several environmental issues throughout the entire life cycle. This study assesses climate, non-climate and resource-related indicators, in the context of the planetary boundaries concept. This approach proposes quantitative boundaries within which humanity can continue to develop and identifies the Earth systems processes that are already operating in a zone of uncertainty (Rockström et al., 2009). Therefore, the integration of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) into energy systems models promises a broader analysis by assessing sustainable pathways for the transformation of energy systems.Stella is an electricity model for European countries based on Calliope (Jesse et al.,2020), that is a multi-scale energy system modelling framework, python-based, and an open-source. As the first step for the integration, a technology set is defined, according to the existing installed capacity in Germany for the reference year 2015. The LCA of the technology set is separated, in construction and operation phases ensuring temporal distribution of the environmental indicators, (Volkart et al., 2018). Then, specific impact indicators per technology are calculated, and they are incorporated into Stella. The energy system model is quantified by studying scenarios that target monetary and emissions optimization. Finally, we determine the environmental performance of the energy system.Preliminary results suggest that fossil fuel technologies, like lignite power plants, not only contribute to climate change but also have a considerable impact on toxic related categories and water eutrophication. Technologies using renewable sources, even though they reduce carbon dioxide emissions, perform in toxic-related categories similar to fossil fuel technologies. As well, they have worse performance in resource-related indicators.