5. Conclusions and recommendations
This overview presents and discusses some relevant issues about the supply chain in renewable energies and identifies some practices of the application of system dynamics approach for this kind of energy. The renewable energy most commonly used for the application of the SD tool has been bioenergy (i.e. biofuels: biodiesel, biomethane, ethanol). On the other hand, in the analysis of the supply chain, some papers have focused on the whole supply chain, while others on a part of the bioenergy supply chain (distribution logistics). They have used scenario analysis to evaluate the impact of the supply chain, as well as its behaviour in the whole system.
Some literature reviews focused on modelling techniques in sustainable supply chain management have shown how to reduce process costs by using operation research methods [5,8,9]. On the other hand, the method most used in Renewable Energy (RE) analysis is Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) [3]. Few reports have shown the potential of applying a System Dynamics (SD) approach in the Renewable Energy Supply Chain (RESC). Therefore, the novelty of this paper compared to the related published literature lies in the use of the SD approach applied to RESC as a main topic. The aim of this study is to identify its main contributions, assumptions, limitations and opportunities for current and future works using a simulation-modelling-based framework as a system dynamics approach.
Although LCA is one of the tools used in RESC analysis, the possibility of using a dynamic perspective for determining the goodness of an energy system could be critical in decision-making. The importance of exploring and analysing the behaviour of the system modelled enables the researcher to focus on critical aspects of the supply chain (e.g. intermittency, variability, manoeuvrability) and not on policies that could be affecting its performance such as the total amount of CO2 or other greenhouse gases emitted during the life cycle of a process.
