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Title: Are renewables as friendly to humans as to the environment?: A social life cycle assessment of renewable electricity
Authors: Takeda, Shutaro  KAKEN_id  orcid https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0559-1105 (unconfirmed)
Keeley, Alexander
Sakurai, Shigeki
Managi, Shunsuke
Norris, Catherine
Author's alias: 武田, 秀太郎
キーリー, アレックス竜太
櫻井, 繁樹
馬奈木, 俊介
ベノア・ノリス, キャサリン
Keywords: renewable energy
supply chain
social responsibility
social life cycle assessment
labor conditions
Malaysia
solar PV
Biomass
Hydro
Issue Date: 5-Mar-2019
Publisher: MDPI AG
Journal title: Sustainability
Volume: 11
Issue: 5
Thesis number: 1370
Abstract: The adoption of renewable energy technologies in developing nations is recognized to have positive environmental impacts; however, what are their effects on the electricity supply chain workers? This article provides a quantitative analysis on this question through a relatively new framework called social life cycle assessment, taking Malaysia as a case example. Impact assessments by the authors show that electricity from renewables has greater adverse impacts on supply chain workers than the conventional electricity mix: Electricity production with biomass requires 127% longer labor hours per unit-electricity under the risk of human rights violations, while the solar photovoltaic requires 95% longer labor hours per unit-electricity. However, our assessment also indicates that renewables have less impacts per dollar-spent. In fact, the impact of solar photovoltaic would be 60% less than the conventional mix when it attains grid parity. The answer of “are renewables as friendly to humans as to the environment?” is “not-yet, but eventually.”
Rights: © 2019 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/2433/241055
DOI(Published Version): 10.3390/su11051370
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