Integrated life cycle assessment in off-grid energy system design—Uncovering low hanging fruit for climate mitigation

We perform an ex-ante life cycle assessment, integrating cradle-to-gate greenhouse gas emissions into an off-grid energy system model. By applying a multi-objective optimization, minimizing both costs and carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) emissions, we find the Pareto boundary between these two goals. As a case study, we chose the power supply to an astronomical observatory in Chile, using mostly solar power and energy storage in batteries and hydrogen. We compare the ex-ante study to a prior ex-post life cycle assessment, and furthermore dive into sensitivities of our model regarding component lifetimes and costs. We find (i) low-hanging fruit in lowering emissions with small cost increases, (ii) ex-ante life cycle assessments’ possibility to find less CO2e intensive power systems compared to ex-post conducted studies, (iii) a pronounced sensitivity of the optimization model on assumed lifetimes of energy storage components. This study shows the importance of including life cycle CO2e emissions into the optimization objective of energy system models. This method uncovers the environmental and economic trade-offs associated with high shares of renewable energies in off-grid energy systems. •We integrate life cycle assessment (LCA) into an off-grid energy system optimization.•The applied case study powers a remote astronomical telescope in Chile.•A multi-objective optimization finds Pareto curves at varying costs and lifetimes.•Low-hanging fruit shows low additional system costs to reduce CO2e impacts.•In contrast, a separate LCA did not find such trade-offs in costs and CO2e emissions.