Periodic Reporting for period 4 - reFUEL (Going global? Renewable fuel trade and social land-use restrictions in a low-carbon energy system)
Reporting period: 2023-02-01 to 2024-01-31
On the land-use impacts side, we found in a large-scale literature review that existing assessments of the land-use requirements of renewable energy facilities on land show high uncertainties globally. In a more detailed analysis for Brazil, we concluded that wind power generation has expanded predominantly on ecologically sensitive land. We also found that wind power and solar PV projects in Brazil are in many instances linked to large-scale investments from European companies (see Figure), and that those projects are associated with privatizations of public land, therefore potentially fuelling conflicts with traditional populations. These impacts have also been studied in qualitative online workshops with local communities and Brazilian partner organizations, and in empirical fieldwork, where we found that renewable energy projects have a variety of detrimental effects on communities. These findings have been disseminated to the general public in Brazil, during a public audience and on a website. In a methodologically and geographically contrasting regional case study in Europe, we showed that the local social cost of wind power generation implied by administrative choices of wind power zones is high.
We have also shown how synthetic fuel production in Brazil can be integrated with existing biofuel production to increase land-use efficiency of both processes. Without expanding current land-use, integrating synthetic fuels into bio-ethanol facilities will allow reaching Brazilian biofuel production goals until 2030. However, no substantial surplus for exports can be expected. As a final contribution of the project, we assessed current EU policy, which aims at importing a significant amount of hydrogen from outside of the EU until 2030. This can lead to additional emissions, as renewable electricity used for hydrogen exports could otherwise be used for decarbonization of the power systems in the exporting countries.
We conclude that the development of inter-regional or inter-continental trade streams for synthetic fuels faces important challenges: first, economic competitiveness is low, unless production schemes can rely on large, cheap and clean streams of CO2 in the production process and costs for electrolyzers decrease substantially. Furthermore, synthetic fuels have larger land related impacts than using direct electrification. We found that these impacts are of importance in practice and may therefore inhibit a large-scale expansion of synthetic fuels, although they may play an important role in some sectors, such as aviation or some industrial applications. And finally, large-scale expansion of renewables for synthetic fuel production may, at least in the short-term, increase global emissions due to leakage effects.
Second, the current practice of defining exclusion zones for renewables can also be criticized as the criteria often exclude perspectives of traditional communities and land-users, especially in the Global South. We found in our case studies that conflicts between developers and rural populations are considerable, and that renewable energy projects in many instances are linked to privatization of public land and the withdrawal of traditional user rights. We also linked Brazilian data on how land is owned with a database on global investments in renewable energy projects, highlighting how international capital, mainly from Europe, is involved in land privatizations.
Third, we have developed a new method for understanding which factors affect growth in wind power generation. We can clearly differentiate how the number of turbines, the size of rotors, tower height, and the quality of wind at the location of turbines affects overall output. We could thus show how wind is used at lower technical efficiency today than a decade ago, but that, at the same time, the output per area swept by the turbine rotors has increased, because turbines today are much higher than a decade ago.