Systemic Sustainability: new methodologies and indexes for the evaluation of new grid infrastructures

The Sustainability plays a role more and more important in the evaluation of new grid infrastructures. In these phases, the analysis should be improved and extended to make it able to evaluate the Triple Bottom Line (TBL) dimensions. The TBL is an accounting framework that incorporates three dimensions of performance: social, environmental and economical; it differs from traditional reporting frameworks and includes environmental and social measures that can be difficult to assign appropriate means of measurement. This approach needs of new methodologies to account the contributes of each project to system sustainability according to its three dimensions of performance. A possible solution is to calculate the TBL in terms of indexes. There is no universal standard method for calculating the TBL indexes, and there are challenges to put it into practice: these challenges include measuring each of the three categories, finding applicable data and calculating a project or policy’s contribution to sustainability. In this paper a new methodology for the TBL assessment is presented and applied to the Italian Network Development Plan to allow a systemic sustainability evaluation comparing it with the development programs. In order to improve the evaluation of projects’ sustainability, two new social-environmental indicators are presented with a case study.