Book chapter 2026
Advances in Sustainable Energy Systems, Storage, and Conservation Springer Nature · pp. 533–538
Life Cycle Assessment can misrepresent long-lived power plants when it treats future environmental impacts deterministically; an enhanced model should account explicitly for risk, time and the value of managerial flexibility.
Life Cycle Assessment is widely used to compare the environmental footprint of power-generation technologies, but conventional models often assume that infrastructure lifecycles unfold as planned. This chapter identifies three limitations of that assumption: risk is undervalued, impacts occurring over different timescales are treated inadequately, and managerial degrees of freedom are underrepresented. It proposes an enhanced LCA approach that adapts ideas from Discounted Cash Flow and Real Options Analysis to environmental impacts and greenhouse-gas flows.
How can Life Cycle Assessment of power plants be enhanced to account for uncertainty, different timescales and managerial flexibility?
The chapter is a conceptual and methodological proposal rather than an empirical validation study. It reviews limitations in conventional power-plant LCA and develops corrective actions using Discounted Cash Flow and Real Options Analysis. The key idea is to apply discounting and option logic to environmental impacts instead of financial cash flows. The resulting enhanced LCA model is proposed for subsequent testing across technologies in the Italian electricity system.
Power technologies do not face the same uncertainty over their lifecycles, yet standard LCA often treats future inputs, outputs and operating conditions deterministically. This can bias comparisons between technologies with very different risk profiles.
Power plants operate over very different lifespans, so emissions and benefits occurring far in the future should not automatically be treated as equivalent to present impacts. The proposed approach adapts discounted-flow logic to environmental impact points and greenhouse-gas flows.
Real Options Analysis can represent the right, but not the obligation, to change infrastructure choices as uncertainty resolves. Integrating option logic into LCA can therefore capture degrees of freedom such as modularity, deferral or reconfiguration that conventional deterministic assessments miss.
The chapter reframes LCA from a static comparison tool toward a decision-support framework for infrastructure operating under uncertainty. This creates a conceptual bridge between environmental assessment and the methods used to value flexibility in engineering and project management.
For policymakers and infrastructure decision makers, the proposal matters because technology choices for net-zero transitions involve different lifespans, maturities and uncertainties. A method that incorporates these differences can support more realistic comparisons and more adaptable long-term investment strategies.
Locatelli, G., Paravano, A., Neri, A., & Cagno, E. (2026). Towards a Net-Zero Infrastructure: Proposal for an Enhanced LCA Model for Power Plants. In P. Pong (Ed.), Advances in Sustainable Energy Systems, Storage, and Conservation (pp. 533–538). Springer Nature. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-98997-1_56
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