Browse by author
Lookup NU author(s): Joris Baars, Professor Oliver Heidrich
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
© 2023 The Authors. Published by American Chemical Society. The large-scale adoption of low-carbon technologies can result in trade-offs between technical, socio-economic, and environmental aspects. To assess such trade-offs, discipline-specific models typically used in isolation need to be integrated to support decisions. Integrated modeling approaches, however, usually remain at the conceptual level, and operationalization efforts are lacking. Here, we propose an integrated model and framework to guide the assessment and engineering of technical, socio-economic, and environmental aspects of low-carbon technologies. The framework was tested with a case study of design strategies aimed to improve the material sustainability of electric vehicle batteries. The integrated model assesses the trade-offs between the costs, emissions, material criticality, and energy density of 20,736 unique material design options. The results show clear conflicts between energy density and the other indicators: i.e., energy density is reduced by more than 20% when the costs, emissions, or material criticality objectives are optimized. Finding optimal battery designs that balance between these objectives remains difficult but is essential to establishing a sustainable battery system. The results exemplify how the integrated model can be used as a decision support tool for researchers, companies, and policy makers to optimize low-carbon technology designs from various perspectives.
Author(s): Baars J, Cerdas F, Heidrich O
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Environmental Science and Technology
Year: 2023
Volume: 57
Issue: 12
Pages: 5056-5067
Print publication date: 28/03/2023
Online publication date: 13/03/2023
Acceptance date: 27/02/2023
Date deposited: 31/03/2023
ISSN (print): 0013-936X
ISSN (electronic): 1520-5851
Publisher: American Chemical Society
URL: https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.2c04080
DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.2c04080
Altmetrics provided by Altmetric
