Life Cycle Assessment of Energy Systems

Closing the Ethical Loophole of Social Sustainability

Nicholas Sakellariou

• Publisher: Wiley-Scrivener
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781119418535
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias físicas
• Subtopic: Energía

This groundbreaking work is the most in-depth and state-of-the-art study on the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of energy systems, the only volume available on this critical subject.

Energy and sustainability are two of the most important and often most misunderstood subjects in our world today. As these two subjects have grown in importance over the last few decades, interest in the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) model has grown as well, as a potentially crucial tool in understanding and striving towards sustainability in energy systems. Not just wind and solar systems, but all energy systems, need to be understood through this model.

Wind and solar power have the potential to decentralize the U.S. energy system by offering local communities electricity and economic support, depending on the scale and design of projects. Nevertheless, every energy technology potentially faces environmental costs, lay and expert opposition, and risks to public health. Engineers play a central role as designers, builders, and operators in energy systems. As they extend their expertise into electrical, mechanical and chemical fields, from fossil fuel-based systems to renewable energy systems, "sustainability" is steadily becoming one of the key criteria engineers apply in their work. This groundbreaking new study argues that engineering cultures foster sustainability by adopting assumptions and problem-solving practices as part of their identities when designing and building engineering projects.

This work examines the politics of creating, utilizing, and modifying Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) in the construction of renewable energy systems. The only volume of its kind ever written, it is a must-have for any engineer, scientist, manager, or other professional working in or interested in Life Cycle Assessment and its relation to energy systems and impact on environmental and economic sustainability.

Part I
ENGINEERING AND SUSTAINABILITY

Chapter 1
Engineering Sustainability, Sustaining Engineering

Engineers are the unacknowledged philosophers of the postmodern world

Carl Mitcham, “The Importance of Philosophy to Engineering”¹

Introduction

In light of “undeniable realities of acid rain, reduction in the ozone layer, and (now) CO₂ emissions,” wrote the New Zealander engineer David Thom, chairman of the World Federation of Engineering Organizations (WFEO) Committee on Engineering and Environment from 1991 to 1999, “we see the dangerous failure … [of the position that] … the engineer is the servant of political processes.” Thom, echoing many past and present engineering leaders, suggested that political arrangements could hardly be expected to settle the social impacts of technology. In this regard it was “incumbent on the engineer (in professional self-interest, if no for other reason) to become fluent in the analysis of [such] consequences” through adopting the tools and fundamental precepts of sustainability.²

Six years after Thom distinguished between engineering service and political servitude, he asserted that the profession had “a choice between two paths.” Engineers, he elaborated, could either “trail behind the accelerating pace of events … until … [they] are no longer relevant,” or they could “accept challenge, change, trauma and travail and march in the vein of the new Industrial Revolution.”³ This preoccupation with meeting the sustainability challenge so that engineers are not “left behind in the decision-making process that will influence the future shape of this world” not only prompted Thom’s article, but also the 1993 American Association of Engineering Societies (AAES) statement on the “Role of the Engineer in Sustainable Development.”⁴

This realization is how sustainability became an engineering ideology of assessing environmental impacts throughout a product or project’s life cycle. At the same time, this ideology converged with the vision of engineering professional transformation conceived by practitioners as a response to a perceived societal demand for conservation. In the larger society of the late 1980s, there were growing concerns that technologies were causing massive environmental damage—this was an environmental crisis. At one level, because engineers work with technologies, their very work and worldviews were suddenly being endangered and questioned from the outside. At another, due to their professional practices and cultures, some engineers identified themselves as culturally and politically “invisible.” A small minority of creative engineer-philosophers thus sought to rescue their profession’s technology crisis through integrating “sustainability” into their principles and work.

In the late 1980s, engineers were confronted anew with the dominant image of a shrinking environment. Spokesmen for the profession suggested that engineering work was admired for creating an urban, technological civilization using the world’s natural resources, while it was simultaneously blamed for exploiting such resources to the verge of extinction. By the 1990s, some engineers were writing about both ongoing evidence regarding environmental constraints and resource deficiency, and a need to apply root engineering values, expertise, and practices in a process of transformation. The prevailing image of growth-driven change gone awry, and development fraught with ecological disaster, substantially mobilized international and US engineering organizations and elite practitioners, who wanted to keep pace in the race to a technological future.

Responding to the economic-environmental challenge, the 1990s produced two distinct engineering ideologies of sustainability—one emphasizing engineering innovation, and the other emphasizing socio-cultural change. The first ideology, based on creativity, resembles an ideology of technological change, as characterized by engineering historian Matt Wisnioski in his analysis of American engineering in the 1960s. The technological change ideology of sustainability refers to engineering reform controlled and directed by engineers themselves—in other words, technological practices can be improved through the application of expertise. In this book I am building on Wisnioski’s dialectical framework adding to it another dimension for the 21^st century; I highlight how the dialectic between sustainability and engineering has been defined largely by the ideology of technological change.⁵

Wisnioski’s compelling argument is that an intellectual crisis of technology within American society (between 1957 and 1973) presented a conceptual lens through which engineers could interpret technology as modernity. He shows that an ideology of technological change served as the counter-paradigm to an ideology of technopolitics while positing that technology was neither good, nor bad, nor was it neutral. Since the 1970s, Wisnioski contends, the solution that American engineers have favored for the dilemmas of technology and social progress has been that “[t]hrough rational management, … technology’s unintended consequences could be minimized and its positive capacities maximized.”⁶

The second and less influential ideology of engineering sustainability, with its emphasis on socio-cultural change, stems from a minority of practitioners and academics during the 1980s and 1990s who self-identified with the conceptual framework of social responsibility. Engineers associated with organizations like Engineers for Social Responsibility (ESR), the subaltern US group of American Engineers for Social Responsibility (AESR) discussed in chapter 3, and later the International Network of Engineers and Scientists for Global Responsibility (INES) mindfully suggested a more culturally and politically sensitive vision for engineering sustainability. The technopolitics ideology of sustainability is about engineering challenge: it places more emphasis on the devolution of expertise from the existing model of engineering and society, and it questions the dominant values of engineering practice.

Ideology, then, is important for understanding the current problem with how sustainability is defined in engineering. It is defined predominantly in a narrow way, such that a particular type of scientific investigation is considered valid to answer questions of sustainability. And the way sustainability is framed bears resemblance to other cultural patterns in engineering—it gets stripped of power issues, of people, of alternative ways of thinking about the topic in general, including environmental justice, class issues and a free-market critique. A sustainability engineer who is not paying attention to power relations is likely to reproduce social injustice; we see that, for example, in terms of who becomes an engineer and in terms of the entire experience of technical education as one that delivers a certain conformity to a set of values and a set of applications in engineering. It is my hope that some engineers who do not or cannot identify with an alternative professional culture will start to feel as though they have a relationship with non-traditional philosophies into discussions about sustainability. Indeed one reason for examining the history and politics of sustainability engineering in ideological terms is that it extends an understanding of the current coexistence of corporate system approaches along with a reformist movement in considering a redefinition of the profession and its practitioners.

Three points need to be emphasized regarding the growth of sustainability identity in engineering. First, as I will show in detail in chapter 2, “sustainability engineering” did not come about naturally, but required substantial ideological and institutional transformation. Technological change as the dominant engineering ideology is largely confined to the narrow limits of technical problem solving. Advocating for apolitical expertise, most engineers conceptualize themselves as mathematical problem solvers and society as a set of discrete problems, to be solved through the application of sc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Part I: Engineering and Sustainability
• Part II: Life Cycle Analysis
• Part III: Case Studies
• Bibliography
• Appendix 1: Solar Ranch One Timeline (Siting, Permitting, Financing and Pre-Construction)
• Appendix 2: Sample of Community Concerns as Regards to the Solar Ranch One, Alpine, Wildflower and Blue Sky RE projects
• Index
• End User License Agreement