Decarbonization of electricity generation can support climatechange mitigation and presents an opportunity to address pollution resulting from fossil-fuel combustion. Generally, renewable technologies require higher initial investments in infrastructure than fossil-based power systems. To assess the tradeoffs of increased up-front emissions and reduced operational emissions, we present, to our knowledge, the first global, integrated lifecycle assessment (LCA) of long-term, wide-scale implementation of electricity generation from renewable sources (i.e., photovoltaic and solar thermal, wind, and hydropower) and of carbon dioxide capture and storage for fossil power generation. We compare emissions causing particulate matter exposure, freshwater ecotoxicity, freshwater eutrophication, and climate change for the climate-change-mitigation (BLUE Map) and business-as-usual (Baseline) scenarios of the International Energy Agency up to 2050. We use a vintage stock model to conduct an LCA of newly installed capacity year-by-year for each region, thus accounting for changes in the energy mix used to manufacture future power plants. Under the Baseline scenario, emissions of air and water pollutants more than double whereas the low-carbon technologies introduced in the BLUE Map scenario allow a doubling of electricity supply while stabilizing or even reducing pollution. Material requirements per unit generation for low-carbon technologies can be higher than for conventional fossil generation: 11-40 times more copper for photovoltaic systems and 6-14 times more iron for wind power plants. However, only two years of current global copper and one year of iron production will suffice to build a low-carbon energy system capable of supplying the world's electricity needs in 2050.land use | climate-change mitigation | air pollution | multiregional input-output | CO 2 capture and storage
In this paper, we conduct a cross-country analysis of energy consumption and energy efficiency for the dairy industry in four European countries. Changes in energy efficiency were monitored in two different ways. One way is to look at the energy use by tonne of milk processed by dairies (EEI p1 ). Another way is by comparing the actual energy use with the energy that would have been used if no changes in energy efficiency would have taken place (EEI p2 ). A characteristic of EEI p2 is that it corrects for differences in product mix among countries and in time. We found that changes in production mix are important in three of the four countries studied and that EEI p2 should be preferred when comparing levels of energy efficiency among countries or when there are significant changes in product mix. Once changes in product mix have been taken into account, our results show that France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom have reduced their values in EEI p2 , respectively by À0.4%, À2.1%, À1.2% and À3.8% per annum. The results also show that the British, German and Dutch dairy industries have converged towards similar (lower) values in their energy efficiency indicators and that the French dairy industry would save 30% if were to converge to similar values of EEI p as the ones obtained for Germany or the United Kingdom. r
In this paper, we have used energy and physical production data to develop energy efficiency indicators for the meat industry of four European countries for the last 15 years. Our results show a significant increase in the energy use per tonne of product in all countries (between 14% and 48%). In order to understand the drivers behind the trends, factors such as the share of frozen products, the share of cut-up products and increasing food hygiene measures are analysed. We find that strong hygiene regulations can explain between one and two-thirds of the increase while the role of increasing shares of frozen and cut fresh meat it is found to be of no significance.
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