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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 ![]() ![]() 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 |
Appears in Collections: | Journal Articles |

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