Track: Sustainability and Green Systems

Abstract

This study has demonstrated that renewable energy resources are sustainable technologies the wind power stations having the highest rank sustainability are followed by the nuclear and hydro followed by solar. The various sources of energy were assessed for sustainability based on indicators like price of power generated, lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions, resource availability, conversion efficiency, land requirements, social impacts and water consumption. In the assessment, indicators were assumed to have equal importance to sustainable development and were equally important in ranking energy sources on basis of their sustainability. Wind was ranked the most sustainable followed by hydropower, photovoltaics and then geothermal while coal was the least sustainable.           Coal and nuclear are the most favorable based on price of electricity produced but based on average prices, geothermal and hydro have the lowest possible prices and hence most favorable. Among renewable sources, photovoltaics has highest average and overall highest cost of generation, although it remains cheaper than gas and coal at the lowest limit. On electrical efficiency, hydropower has the highest efficiency while photovoltaics has the lowest electrical efficiency. Greenhouse gas emissions were low in all non-fossil fuels, with Wind, hydro and nuclear have lowest values of greenhouse gas emissions while coal has the highest greenhouse gas emissions.