Employment-Weighted Fair Wage Potential: A Social Indicator for the Power Sector

Attaining the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals demands a partnership between industrial sectors. The power sector pulls the challenging goal of providing affordable and clean energy to society and industry, each with specific issues. This work recognises the need to address the three dimensions of sustainability and identifies a gap in the literature on indicators to assess the social dimension. In this context, the research presents the employment-weighted fair-wage potential, relating the electricity produced to social data, with ten power technology options. The proposed indicator ranks the alternatives, pinpointing the best technology based on social aspects. The analysis employs a social life-cycle approach with primary and secondary data, worldwide real and living wages, and employment factors. The findings indicate the values of the gas- and oil-based technologies as 3.55 and 3.51 at the operation and maintenance stages, respectively. In contrast, photovoltaics offers the lowest potential value (1.32), followed by biomass-biogas (1.86). Run-of-river emerges as the fairest wage potential option (3.33), followed by the reservoir (2.80), while Solar PV technology presents the lowest value (1.16).