IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute

This report presents the final phase of the project “Hundred Percent Renewable – How Many Percent Sustainable?”, funded by the Swedish Energy Agency. The background to the project is the increased focus on a 100% renewable electricity system in Sweden and Europe, as well as the growing pressure on organizations to understand and influence sustainability impacts across their value chains. The project builds on previous work applying the SDG Impact Assessment Tool and reviewing six major sustainability frameworks relevant to the Swedish context. Insights from earlier parts of the project have informed the design of the tool, which integrates concepts from the UN Sustainable Development Goals, Doughnut Economics, Planetary Boundaries, and the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD).

The aim has been to develop user-friendly tool for assessing the sustainability of renewable electricity technologies—specifically solar PV, wind power, and hydropower - in a holistic, actionable, and transparent way. The tool is designed to provide a structured evaluation method for both environmental and socio-economic sustainability risks across the life cycle of renewable energy systems. The methodology divides the energy system into upstream, core, and downstream phases and evaluates 19 sustainability dimensions—8 ecological and 11 social/socio-economic. The resulting Excel-based tool is developed to be easily accessible yet comprehensive in the sense that it enables the user to work through all sustainability dimensions and obtain an overview of necessary next steps in ensuring sustainability in all parts of the value chain. The tool uses a qualitative, matrix-based scoring system that enables users to assess both the risk of negative impacts and their own organizational agency in influencing these outcomes.

The report (as well as the tool) includes life cycle overviews, system descriptions and material analyses of renewable electricity technologies, based on literature and life cycle data. Highlighting key materials and possible key sustainability risks such as use of critical raw materials, these overviews are meant to assist the reader/tool user in risk assessment of their specific project. The transition to renewable energy is essential for meeting global climate targets, and technologies like wind, solar and hydro power play a central role in this shift. Yet while the environmental rationale is relatively clear, the social and political dimensions of the transition are equally critical. Expanding renewable power capacity without careful consideration of sustainability impacts across the full life cycle risks replicating the same patterns of exploitation and inequality that define the fossil fuel economy. This underscores the need for robust, transparent assessment tools to guide more just and sustainable energy transitions. The concluding discussion reflects on this and on methodological challenges—such as the limited availability of social LCAs—and the potential for future improvements, including broader application of multi-criteria decision analysis. The tool is intended to complement, not replace, existing assessment methods and to support a more holistic decision-making process in the energy transition which still allows for a prioritization of action in the sustainability endeavors of organizations across the energy sector.