Sustainability of China’s electricity system; proposal for astructured analysis

A methodological framework has been designed to analyze the sustainability of China’s electricity sector in the wake of the 13th Development Plan for the Electricity Sector (2016-2020). The proposal is based on ISO 14040 but also incorporates some features from the "new LCA" approach described in the CALCAS project. Discussion is provided about its practical implementation, including definition of objectives through sustainability questions and subquestions, definition of scope, definition of scenarios, functional unit, selection of sustainability issues and indicators, suitability of analysis tools, availability of inventory data and aggregation methods to facilitate decision making.