Sustainability assessment of energy technologies via social indicators: Results of a survey among European energy experts
Introduction
Securing a sustainable energy provision is one of the central political challenges of the present. Ever since the United Nation conferences on climate change held in Rio de Janeiro (1992), Kyoto (1997) and the latest conference in Bali in 2007 as well as the newest reports published by the intergovernmental panel on climate change, sustainable energy provision has become an important topic for political decision makers throughout the world. Especially the member states of the European Union are attempting to give clearer meaning to the nebulous concept of sustainability through campaigns, networks and regulations.2 At first glance, the possibilities for securing a sustainable future energy provision in Europe seem abundant, considering the great variety of technological options and primary sources of energy. On a second glance the environmental, climatic and economic constraints make major changes in the present energy production and consumption inevitable, which also implies that many of the fossil fuel options need to be drastically reduced. In addition, merely assessing the economic and ecological dimension of sustainable development is insufficient, since the social effects of energy technologies need to be considered as well. While economic and ecological sustainability assessment of energy systems are commonplace (cp. Lund, Münster, 2006; Glachant and Leveque, 2009), only few social scientific inquiries on the EU level have been conducted. This article attempts to fill this gap, focusing on the sustainability assessment of energy technologies via social indicators to provide an input for future energy policy strategies. The article addresses the question, which social aspects need to be considered for a systematic analysis of energy technologies as well as the question, which of the technologies under study can be considered sustainable on the basis of selected social indicators. To this aim the remainder of the article is structured as follows: Section 2.1 will review the current state of research on sustainability concerning energy systems, while Section 2.2 will outline prior research on social indicators highlighting their application for assessing current and future energy technologies. Section 3 covers the methodology underlying the actual assessment of social indicators. Section 3.1 details the selection of indicators on the basis of a desktop literature review. Section 3.2 covers the steps undertaken to verify and legitimize the selected indicators through a survey among members of relevant stakeholder groups and a subsequent Group Delphi procedure and Section 3.3 details the actual data collection through interviewing experts from France, Italy, Switzerland and Germany. The results of these interviews are presented and interpreted in Section 4.
Section snippets
The concept of sustainability—an integrative precondition for the assessment of energy technologies
The assessment of energy technologies should not only be guided by short-term economic gains but must also take into consideration its repercussions on inter- and intra-generational equity. Only by incorporating this long-term perspective, holistic technological impact assessment is possible. This idea in turn is intrinsically tied to the concept of sustainability. In this section we present a short overview of the concepts, history and recent applications in research on energy technologies.
The selection of social indicators for the assessment of energy systems
Lacking a solid theoretical framework from which to develop new social indicators, we opted to select an indicator set from existing indicators via literature and desktop research. The research team followed rigid selection criteria. Using the keywords “social indicator”, “sustainability”, “environmental indicator” and “energy indicator”, we investigated literature from the last twenty years and searched for suitable indicators for the assessment of social effects of energy systems. As a
Overview of indicators
In this paper we will focus on the main results of the evaluation and assessment of current and future key energy technologies with respect to sustainability. Nuclear power (EPR and LMFBR), hydro power (storage dam and run-of-river), pulverized coal steam plant and gas turbine combined cycle were selected since they are currently the most predominant energy generation technologies in the EU (Eurostat, 2008). Since there was only little variation in responses to the two nuclear options EPR and
Conclusion
This article focuses on social sustainability assessment of energy technologies using expert judgments to rate energy technologies on a set of social indicators that were generated in a discursive process. Social sustainability was investigated in a two-step procedure: in the first step social indicators were developed and their usefulness for measuring social sustainability of energy systems was verified by the European stakeholders. As there was no suitable theoretical background on which to
Acknowledgments
Our due thanks go to the all interviewees and persons, who participated in the survey and Delphi as well as to Professor Ortwin Renn and two anonymous reviewers whose feedback on earlier versions of this paper was invaluable to us.
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The New Energy Externalities Development for Sustainability (NEEDS) Project was supported by the Directorate General for Research of the European Commission in the context of the 6th Framework Program. The objective of the NEEDS Project was to evaluate the full costs and benefits of energy policies and of future energy systems, both at the level of individual countries and for the enlarged EU as a whole. In this context NEEDS refined and developed an externalities methodology already set up in the ExternE project (www.externe.info). The indicator development and assessment, which is described in this article was set up within the limitations and freedom of this externality methodology. Results have to be interpreted by considering this context. For further information see: www.needs-project.org.