Sustainable Product-Service System (S.PSS) applied to Distributed Renewable Energy (DRE) in low and middle-income contexts: a case studies analysis.

摘要

In industrialized contexts Sustainable Product-Service Systems (S.PSS) have been studied since the end of the 90’s as business models with the potential to decouple the creation of value from the consumption of materials and energy, and thus significantly reducing the environmental load of the life-cycles of current product systems. \ud\udIn the framework of the Sustainable Energy for All initiative (United Nations, SE4All decade 2014-2024), the EU funded, LeNSes project - the Learning Network for Sustainable energy systems (Edulink II programme, 2013-2016) has formulated the following Research Hypothesis: “The S.PSS offer model applied to Distributed Renewable Energy (DRE) is a win-win approach to diffuse them (DRE) in low and middle-income (all) contexts, because it reduces/cuts both the initial investment cost of hardware purchasing and the life-cycle costs of maintenance, repair, upgrade, etc. while improving local skills and rising local employment, resulting in a key leverage for a sustainable development process aiming at democratizing the access to resources, goods and services.”\ud\udThe paper describes the Research Hypothesis, the method adopted for the case studies analysis and the achieved results. The case studies analysis validate the hypothesis and shows various ways in which initial investment costs and life-cycle costs are reduced/cut when a S.PSS model is applied to DRE. These reductions/cuts are present both for Business to Business (B2B) and Business to Consumers (B2C) offers, as well as when the offer is the DRE system alone or when it is coupled with related Energy Using Products (EUP) or Equipment (EUE).