Renewable Energy Supply Chains and the Just Transition

Renewable energy is human civilization’s most rapidly growing form of energy. New energy sources, fuels, and generation devices have supply chains that differ from conventional energy sources, raising new questions about environmental impact and justice considerations when scaling up renewable energy deployment. The differential ways that these production systems evolve (or do not) offer opportunities to comparatively evaluate critical environmental and social issues and to ask what factors make these issues vary as they do. Supply chains offer one way to organize production systems to compare one versus another, but also to compare processes within and along the chains.