The European Union aims to guarantee clean energy for all Europeans. It has therefore set decarbonization and environmental pollution reduction targets, and is also promoting an efficient use of resources, which allows for a competitive energy market accessible to all citizens. In this context, the European 2016 reference scenario was a useful tool to analyze the long-term effects of climate, economic and environmental policies of each member state.

In the prospect of a sustainable development, it goes without saying that the evolution of the energy system shall also take into account any environmental trade-offs and ensure compatibility between energy and climate targets and any other impacts.

The Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology is a helpful tool in this sense. It allows you to evaluate the environmental profile of a system/product along its entire life cycle, considering diverse environmental impact categories. Furthermore, the “life cycle” approach is especially important in the prospect of the growth of non-thermoelectric renewables, in particular wind and photovoltaic.

This work aims to assess the Life Cycle of the current (2018) and 2030 electricity mix of some member states of the European Union (Germany, France, Spain, Belgium, Portugal, Denmark and Finland), to be compared with the results obtained for Italy.

The European Commission focused its greatest efforts on containing climate-changing emissions: this was evident in the policies adopted by the countries we analyzed. According to estimates of the energy mix of these countries by 2030, there is an average reduction of 42% in the impact on climate change – the best result after the reduction of acidification (an impact category closely linked to the first one). Belgium is the only country that does not show a decline in climate-changing emissions. In this country, the decommissioning of nuclear power in favor of imports and gas will cause an increase in emissions by 2030.

The reduction of climate-changing emissions came at the expense of another impact category, the consumption of (mineral, fossil and renewable) resources, which saw an increase precisely for those countries that reduced CO ₂ emissions the most: Spain, France and Portugal.