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Glossary of Terms

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)
(or life cycle costs) The process of measuring the total environmental impact of a fuel over its entire life cycle. LCA most accurately calculates the true costs of a technology, including its impact on the ecosystem. The goal of LCA is to confirm that renewable energies indeed qualify as green, especially as compared to technologies based on fossil fuels. LCA measures land use, materials and energy used in construction of the energy source, operations costs (including decommissioning), manufacturing of components, waste generated in all these processes, and impact on the environment. LCA is evolving, and will continue to take new factors into account and to refine how current ones are calculated, but so far it confirms three renewable technologies as truly green compared to fossil fuels – wind, solar, and geothermal. In general, scientists are working to evolve methodologies that help measure the comparative environmental impact of different fuels. These measurements will help provide the backbone for credits (carbon sequestration credits, etc.) that will structure the energy economy for the twenty-first century.
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