Abstract
Purpose
The environmental impacts of electricity generation are a critical issue towards sustainability and thus an important research topic in several countries. The life cycle assessment methodology has been widely employed to assess electricity generation. However, there are still gaps in research to be explored within this theme. Therefore, this paper aims to conduct a systematic theoretical analysis of the state of the art of the scientific research on LCA of electricity generation systems in the world.
Methods
A critical review of 47 studies was conducted. The study is comprehensive in the analysis of the main aspects of the identified high impact studies as follows: authors, countries, universities, keywords, journals, number of citations, life cycle impact assessment methods, impact categories, software tools, and databases. The Methodi Ordinatio was applied to rank the studies in terms of impact factor and number of citations, pointing out high impact research.
Results and discussion
Wind and solar powers have two of the smallest impact indices in their generation in terms of global warming, compared to other sources. The ecoinvent database was the most used among the studies analyzed, providing data for potential environmental impacts. The most frequently used impact category in the assessments was climate change. The studies are not equally distributed but most of them are concentrated in European countries. In some countries, clean sources seem promising due to their capacity to generate electricity in places with high wind incidence and high capacity for sunlight capture.
Conclusions
The conclusions of this article summarize the characteristics of existing literature and provide suggestions for future work. The results of the study can also be used to promote development actions and foment changes in energy matrices in a global context. The main studies in this area point that in the future, the main sources for electricity generation will be renewable ones, since life cycle assessment of electricity generation systems has been seeking to generate knowledge to support informed decision-making.
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Change history
30 July 2019
The original version of this article unfortunately contained a mistake which was missed during typesetting. The figures of Graph 1 and Figure 6 were switched.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the Editor of the International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment for the efficient handling and prompt return and the reviewers for their thoughtful considerations to improve the earlier version of this manuscript.
Funding
This research was financially supported by the Coordination of Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES) and the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq).
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The original version of this article was revised: The original version of this article unfortunately contained a mistake which was missed during typesetting. The figures of Graph 1 and Figure 6 were switched.
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Barros, M.V., Salvador, R., Piekarski, C.M. et al. Life cycle assessment of electricity generation: a review of the characteristics of existing literature. Int J Life Cycle Assess 25, 36–54 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11367-019-01652-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11367-019-01652-4