Integrated life cycle assessment of electricity supply scenarios confirms global environmental benefit of low-carbon technologies

Life-cycle assessments commonly used to analyze the environmental costs and benefits of climate-mitigation options are usually static in nature and address individual power plants. Our paper presents, to our knowledge, the first life-cycle assessment of the large-scale implementation of climate-mitigation technologies, addressing the feedback of the electricity system onto itself and using scenario-consistent assumptions of technical improvements in key energy and material production technologies.