Environmental assessment of electricity scenarios with Life Cycle Assessment

International audienceThe environmental impacts of existing electricity generation systems have already been assessed with Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) studies. However environmental impacts assessment of scenarios is very rarely evaluated through a life cycle perspective partly because of the complex parameters it involves, such as the temporal technology variation and the spatial dependency per country. Moreover some studies only analyze the effect of limited indicators variation. Considering these parameters is however crucial when steering and evaluating policy options with regards to the possible environmental consequences. The main objective of this paper is to present the methodology undertaken to perform an LCA for energy scenarios through the analysis of environmental impacts. Such methodology has been applied to a specific scenario, a "Renewable" scenario and results are analysed for Austria. This scenario has been developped within EnerGEO European project