Analysis Of The Environmental Costs And Driving Forces Of Global Renewable Energy

In recent years,the development of renewable energy has become an important part of many countries'energy development strategies,but there will still be resources and environmental costs in the process of generating electricity from renewable sources.For example,bio-fuels consume a lot of water and cause soil erosion.From a production perspective,renewable energy has the advantages of low emissions,but from the perspective of consumption?supply chain perspective?,renewable energy can cause direct/indirect consumption and emissions.At present,few literatures study environmental emissions and resource consumption caused by the renewable energy sector from the perspective of consumption,and research on its driving factors is also in the blank.Based on the above problems,this paper analyzes the cost of environmental emissions and resource consumption of the renewable energy sector from the perspective of supply chain to make up for the lack of production perspective.In addition,it identifies key drivers of environmental emissions/resources consumption in the renewable energy sector to provide effective energy conservation and emission reduction policy recommendations for the renewable energy sector.Based on the multi-region input-output table?EXIOBASE?,this paper first sorts out a total of 10 kinds of emissions and resource consumption inventory,i.e.carbon dioxide?CO₂?,nitrous oxide?N₂O?,methane?CH₄?,sulfur dioxide?SO₂?carbon monoxide?CO?,nitrogen oxides?NOx?,ammonia?NH₃?,land resources,metal resources and mineral resources in 163 sectors from 49 countries and regions in the world from 2012 to 2015.Then a multi-regional input-output model?MRIO?is established to calculate the embodied emissions and resource consumption of the 10.This is to quantify the cost of environmental emissions/resources in the renewable energy sector.In order to demonstrate display the results easily,49 countries and regions are divided into 11 groups of economies to draw a global ecological flow figure on the world map.Finally,by constructing a structural decomposition model?SDA?,the driving forces and driving directions of the emission and resource consumption caused by the renewable energy power generation sector are analyzed by five effects:technical effect,input-output effect,consumption structure effect,per capita consumption and population size to identify the drivers of environmental emissions and resource consumption in 11 groups of economies during different time intervals.The results show that from 2012 to 2015,the embodied global energy consumption of greenhouse gases and air pollutants caused by the renewable energy sector showed an increasing trend,of which GHG in 2015 increased 8.45E+05 kt compared with that in2012.The air pollutant emissions in 2012 and 2015 were 2.74E+05 kt and 3.58E+05 kt,respectively.In terms of global consumption of measured resource consumption caused by the renewable energy sector,land resources remained at around 1.55E+04 km² in2012-2014,achieving a significant reduction in 2015?1.28E+04 km²?.This is mainly because of the partial reduction in China.The consumption of metals and mineral resources caused by the renewable energy sector has increased by 66.25 kt and 556.46 kt in 2015 compared to 2012.The final household consumption expenditure is the largest proportion.Overall,the population size effect is positively driven by the consumption measurement/resource consumption caused by the renewable energy sector in various economies.During 2013-2014,the population size effect increased the REN_embodied_GHG of the EU and the US by 3.73E.+04 kt,3.21E+04 kt;input-output effects are negatively driven by consumer resource consumption caused by the renewable energy sector in most economies,The input-output effect in 2012-2013 has the largest negative driving force for China?-17.71 kt?;Technical efficiency,consumption structure effect and per capita consumption are in relation to the specific circumstances of each economy.For example,due to the fact that India's consumption structure is not reasonable,the consumption structure is mostly driven in the positive case.China's per capita consumption has been driven positively,which is related to the rapid growth of China's GDP and the increase in people's consumption levels.