Understanding Full Life-cycle Sustainability Impacts of Energy Alternatives

Pragmatic and reliable methods for assessing sustainability remain difficult for many organizations. Further, understanding the three elements of sustainability over the full life cycle of products and processes is essential. In some cases, understanding environmental issues is the easiest area. However, economic and social issues are less well understood. Life Cycle Sustainability Analysis is a framework for reviewing all three areas and enabling not only full coverage but understanding balancing and interactions between the elements. This paper reviews the three elements of sustainability, life cycle assessment, and analysis and evaluation of the three elements over a life cycle. These frameworks will be described so as to facilitate development of ways to help decision makers present proposals and illustrate results. Means are presented to enable illustration of findings to both expert and non-expert audiences. Specifically, uses of the life cycle sustainability triangle and the life cycle sustainability dashboard will presented. Examples will be presented for a comparison of solar PV panels. Other examples include alternative energy sources in Mexico to 2050, contrasting alternative vehicles, and electricity scenarios in the UK to 2070. The paper is intended to help practitioners better understand linkages between the three elements of sustainability and ways to analyze them.