Carbon footprint scenarios for renewable electricity in Australia Paul Wolfram a, b, * , Thomas Wiedmann b, c , Mark Diesendorf d a Environmental Assessment and Planning Research Group, Technische Universit€ at Berlin (Berlin Institute of Technology), Secretariat EB 5, Straße des 17. Juni 145, 10623, Berlin, Germany b Sustainability Assessment Program (SAP), School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, UNSW Australia, Sydney, NSW, 2052, Australia c ISA, School of Physics A28, The University of Sydney, NSW, 2006, Australia d Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies, UNSW Australia, Sydney, NSW, 2052, Australia article info Article history: Received 4 September 2015 Received in revised form 8 February 2016 Accepted 17 February 2016 Available online 26 February 2016 Keywords: Renewable energy Carbon footprint Scenario analysis Inputeoutput analysis Hybrid Life-Cycle Assessment Australia abstract Despite considerable mitigation efforts, global emissions from the electricity sector continued to grow in recent years. In Australia, the electricity sector is the largest CO 2 -emitting industry, contributing 35% of the country's total greenhouse gas emissions. The Australian government targets an 80% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 relative to 2010. With a large variety and quantity of renewable energy resources, it is technically feasible and seems indispensable that Australia's electricity sector be largely decarbonised by 2050 in order to achieve this target. In this paper, scenario-based hybrid Life- Cycle Assessment is applied to calculate the economy-wide carbon footprints of seven electricity gen- eration technologies in scenarios with differing renewable electricity penetration. This work is the first to apply a full life-cycle approach to scenario analysis of electricity generation in Australia. The findings are at the higher end of previously reported carbon footprint intensity ranges and above median values. However, even when taking into account indirect emissions along the technologies' life-cycles, the re- sults indicate that the employment of different renewable energy technologies can potentially save a considerable fraction of Australia's greenhouse gas emissions. This makes renewables an essential option for climate change mitigation. © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Despite considerable mitigation efforts, global emissions from the electricity and heating sector continued to grow by more than 3% per year on average between 2000 and 2009 (Bruckner et al., 2014). Australia made a binding commitment to reduce green- house gas emissions (GHGE) by at least 5% by 2020 compared to 2000 levels (UNFCCC, 2012). Australia's Intended Nationally Determined Contribution to the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change is an economy-wide target to reduce GHGE by 26 to 28% below 2005 levels by 2030 (DPMC, 2015), but commentators have questioned whether this can be achieved with existing and pro- posed policies (Pears, 2015; Vorrath, 2015). For 2050, an even more ambitious target of 80% emission reduction is envisaged (DOE, 2012). This target was accompanied by the Renewable Energy Target scheme for large-scale electricity generation of 41 TWh/a by 2020 (Diesendorf, 2014), reduced in 2015 to 33 TWh/a by 2020 (Parkinson, 2015). Meanwhile, fossil fuels made up 84% of Australia's electricity generation in 2012e13 (BREE, 2014a, Table 4.1). Thus, electricity generation is the largest emitting industry in Australia with around 35% of total emissions (ClimateWorks et al., 2014; DOE, 2012). Future demand growth is uncertain: some authors forecast that Australia's electricity demand will increase considerably by 143% by 2050 (ClimateWorks et al., 2014), although actual demand for grid electricity has declined each year since 2010 (BREE, 2014a, p. 42). Australia has huge resources of solar, wind and hot rocks (the latter for engineered geothermal power), significant resources of biomass residues and wave power, and modest hydro resources (Geoscience Australia and ABARE, 2010). Given the commercial availability of solar and wind technologies, it seems more likely to achieve deep cuts to GHGE in the electricity sector than in other sectors such as agriculture or non-energy, heavy manufacturing industries e sectors in which low carbon options are less abundant (Buckman and Diesendorf, 2010). Following this rationale, Elliston et al. (2014) argued that the electricity sector should be virtually * Corresponding author. Environmental Assessment and Planning Research Group, Technische Universit€ at Berlin (Berlin Institute of Technology), Secretariat EB 5, Straße des 17. Juni 145,10623, Berlin, Germany. E-mail address: paulwolfram@gmx.de (P. Wolfram). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Cleaner Production journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jclepro http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2016.02.080 0959-6526/© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Journal of Cleaner Production 124 (2016) 236e245