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Relevant energy questions have arisen because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic shock leads to emissions’ reductions consistent with the rates of decrease required to achieve the Paris Agreement goals. Those unforeseen drastic reductions in emissions are temporary as long as they do not involve structural changes. However, the COVID-19 consequences and the subsequent policy response will affect the economy for decades. Focusing on the EU, this discussion article argues how recovery plans are an opportunity to deepen the way towards a low-carbon economy, improving at the same time employment, health, and equity and the role of modelling tools. Long-term alignment with the low-carbon path and the development of a resilient transition towards renewable sources should guide instruments and policies, conditioning aid to energy-intensive sectors such as transport, tourism, and the automotive industry. However, the potential dangers of short-termism and carbon leakage persist. The current energy-socio-economic-environmental modelling tools are precious to widen the scope and deal with these complex problems. The scientific community has to assess disparate, non-equilibrium, and non-ordinary scenarios, such as sectors and countries lockdowns, drastic changes in consumption patterns, significant investments in renewable energies, and disruptive technologies and incorporate uncertainty analysis. All these instruments will evaluate the cost-effectiveness of decarbonization options and potential consequences on employment, income distribution, and vulnerability. © 2021

In the context of the European Green Deal and the Recovery Plan for Europe, CSP can play its role, by providing dispatchable and flexible energy when other renewable technologies cannot. The aim of this paper is to identify the potential socioeconomic, social and environmental impacts associated to the future deployment of CSP projects in Spain, taking into account the global value chain. Based on an extended multiregional input-output model developed by the authors, this paper identifies the country and sector-origin of nine sustainability indicators for the two dominant CSP technologies (parabolic trough and central receiver). The research considers the deployment of a 200 MW CSP power plant in Spain to compare the sustainability impacts of these two technologies under three different scenarios regarding the country-origin of the main components. The results show that central receivers have more positive economic impacts, both in terms of value added and employment creation, and lower negative environmental and social impacts than the parabolic trough alternative. The economic and environmental impacts of the CSP deployed in Spain depend on the origin of components, with the highest negative environmental impacts occurring when the components come from China and the lowest when they come from Germany. The same occurs for the social impacts and supply risks, which are lower when Germany supplies the main components. The scenario in which Spain supplies all the components performs better than the Chinese supply scenario in terms of social risks, whereas no major differences among them were found on supply risks.

The transition towards a more sustainable and decarbonised energy system is mandatory for achieving global climate objectives, and renewable energies are essential to this purpose. There are different methodologies to assess the sustainability, each with its strengths and limitations. Thus, hybrid approaches integrating Input-Output analysis and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) are often proposed to overcome limitations and take advantage of strengths of renewable technologies. Through a case study of Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) technology, a potentially significant technology in the European context, this study provides an environmental assessment of seven environmental indicators by applying and comparing methodological approaches: Environmental Extended Multiregional Input-Output (EMRIO), Life Cycle Assessment and two hybrid approaches used in literature. Among those, we propose a new hybrid tieredapproach, named Identification and Subtraction Method (ISM), that expands the boundaries of the LCA method, identifying in MRIO results the impacts from sectors not included in the LCA. The results indicated that the LCA and EMRIO approaches provide impact values in the lower and upper ranges, respectively, although there are some exceptions. The proposed ISM method achieves to expand the LCA boundaries by including indirect impacts, avoiding any double-counting and retaining the technological detail and representativeness of the process-based LCA.The highest differences between methods are found in the assessment of local impacts and the depletion of the resources for either fuels or minerals and metals, while the methods tend to agree more on the quantification of global and regional impacts. However, there are limitations to the implementation of the impact characterization methods and the quantification of the potential impacts that should be borne in mind when comparing the results of the different methods.

Relevant energy questions have arisen because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic shock leads to emissions’ reductions consistent with the rates of decrease required to achieve the Paris Agreement goals. Those unforeseen drastic reductions in emissions are temporary as long as they do not involve structural changes. However, the COVID-19 consequences and the subsequent policy response will affect the economy for decades. Focusing on the EU, this discussion article argues how recovery plans are an opportunity to deepen the way towards a low-carbon economy, improving at the same time employment, health, and equity and the role of modelling tools. Long-term alignment with the low-carbon path and the development of a resilient transition towards renewable sources should guide instruments and policies, conditioning aid to energy-intensive sectors such as transport, tourism, and the automotive industry. However, the potential dangers of short-termism and carbon leakage persist. The current energy-socio-economic-environmental modelling tools are precious to widen the scope and deal with these complex problems. The scientific community has to assess disparate, non-equilibrium, and non-ordinary scenarios, such as sectors and countries lockdowns, drastic changes in consumption patterns, significant investments in renewable energies, and disruptive technologies and incorporate uncertainty analysis. All these instruments will evaluate the cost-effectiveness of decarbonization options and potential consequences on employment, income distribution, and vulnerability. © 2021