Evolution of External Health Costs of Electricity Generation in the Baltic States

Abstract

Implementation of strict policies for mitigating climate change has a direct impact on public health as far as the external health costs of electricity generation can be reduced, thanks to the reduction of emission of typical pollutants by switching to cleaner low carbon fuels and achieving energy efficiency improvements. Renewables have lower external health costs due to the lower life cycle emission of typical air pollutants linked to electricity generation, such as SO2, NOx, particulate matter, NH3, or NMVOC (Non-methane volatile organic compounds), which all appear to have serious negative effects on human health. Our case study performed in the Baltic States analyzed the dynamics of external health costs in parallel with the dynamics of the main health indicators in these countries: life expectancy at birth, mortality rates, healthy life years, self-perceived health, and illness indicators. We employed the data for external health costs retrieved from the CASES database, as well as the health statistics data compiled from the EUROSTAT database. The time range of the study was 2010–2018 due to the availability of consistent health indicators for the EU Member States. Our results show that the decrease of external health costs had a positive impact on the increase of the self-perceived good health and reduction of long-standing illness as well as the decrease of infant death rate. Our conclusions might be useful for other countries as well as for understanding the additional benefits of climate change mitigation policies and tracking their positive health impacts. The cooperation initiatives on clean energy and climate change mitigation between countries like One Belt One Road initiative by the Chinese government can also yield additional benefits linked to the public health improvements.

Externalities of power generation in Visegrad countries and their integration through support of renewables

“…The main energy market failure is energy externalities. Therefore, assessment of externalities and integration of them via policy tools allows promoting sustainable energy development (Lu et al, 2020;Nagaj, 2020).…”

External costs of electricity generation in 27 European countries from 2010–2030: Pathway toward sustainability or business as usual?

“…Numerous research works evaluate the external costs of electricity production within a single country or for a single technology, but only a few studies compare the external costs of electricity production between different countries [20,21,[35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43]. These latter studies face the extra challenge that a mere aggregation of power plant technology-specific emissions into a country-specific energy mix is inadequate, as even the emissions from the same technologies differ across countries [7,51].…”

“…Most studies on external costs of electricity examine the system only in one country or region [28][29][30][31][32][33][34]. Studies that compare the externality costs of electricity in different countries usually focus on a small number of externalities [20,21,[35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43]. Generally, these studies face the challenge of combining country-specific technology data with country-specific external cost rates.…”

Spatial accessibility assessment to healthcare facilities: urban and rural areas

“…It seems necessary to include in this analysis comparing the total population in a health sector with the population with access to services (palliative care and administrative barriers). In order to determine whether a given area has inadequate health services, the geographical accessibility of health services refers to the relative access to health services in a given area [3][4][5]. Spatial accessibility is influenced by distance, travel time and spatial distribution of healthcare providers and consumers.…”