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The study presents a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of Italian electricity scenarios, devised in the Integrated National Energy and Climate Plan (INECP). A fully representative LCA of the national electricity system was carried out, taking into consideration a great number of different power plant typologies for current (2016 and 2017) and future (2030) electricity mixes. The study confirms that LCA can be a powerful tool for supporting energy planning and strategies assessment. Indeed the results put in evidence not only the improvement of the environmental profile from the current to the future mix (the impacts decrease from 2016 to 2030 due to the transition towards renewables, mainly wind and photovoltaic), but also underline the difference between two scenarios at 2030 (being the scenario that includes the strategic objectives of the INECP to 2030 the one showing best environmental profile), providing an evaluation of the effect of different energy policies. For example, in the INECP scenario CO2 eq/kWh is 46% lower than current scenario and 37% lower than business as usual scenario for 2030. Moreover, considering different impact categories allowed to identify potential environmental trade-offs. The results suggest also the need of future insight on data related to photovoltaic technologies and materials and their future development.

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Abstract. The energy sector will drastically change in the following years; multiple agreements have been signed by countries with the purpose to reduce carbon emission and contain the global temperature increase. Besides, in the next years the energy demand will increase with the growth of the Information and Communications Technology sector. To combine these two aspects, future energy needs to be produced with renewable resources and less with fossil fuels. An opportunity to discover and plan the use of renewable energy resources are geospatial data derived from satellite acquisitions. The European Earth Observation programme Copernicus provides multiple datasets in an Open Science approach. Within this paper, multiple datasets offered by Copernicus services are presented in relation to their exploitation for the energy system analysis, with a particular attention to renewable energy. The datasets will be analysed according to their properties and possibility of usage. Additional Copernicus satellite derived data that can benefit the emerging topic of the food-energy-water nexus are finally presented to point out significant development in the energy sector which is recently claiming growing attention.

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