Development and application of renewable energy-focused input-output table

The present study develops a renewable energy-focused input-output table (REFIO) for the year 2013, which can quantitatively and objectively assess environmental and socio-economic impacts of renewable power generation technologies and policies. The REFIO was built on the latest input-output table for Japan, by disaggregating the original sectors and adding new sectors related to 12 different renewable power generation technologies, namely, four types of solar photovoltaic, wind, two types of geothermal, small-scale hydro, wood biomass, and three types of biogas. The new 41 sectors are created for the construction and operation of the above power generation facilities, using both open data such as government statistics and published industry information, and confidential data collected from companies, associations and non-profit organizations, etc. To demonstrate an advantage of the REFIO developed, output multipliers are estimated for the construction and operation sectors of different renewable power generation technologies. The output multipliers vary from 2.51 to 3.13 for the construction sectors and from 1.05 to 2.62 for the operation sectors, depending on the types of technology. The more important finding is that there are distinct differences among different technologies in terms of sectors where the greater production is indirectly generated.