Impacts of nuclear energy, greener energy, and economic progress on the load capacity factor: What we learn from the leading nuclear power economies?

Abstract

The worldwide tremor of environmental degradation commonly represents the escalation of emissions levels and ecological footprints that harm the planet's biocapacity. This is because of using gigantic non-renewable energy resources, urbanization stream and massive economic activities in the major industrialized nations. Amid this situation, we investigate the influence of disaggregated energy measures, e.g., renewable, and nuclear energy, income growth and urbanization on the load capacity factor (biocapacity divided by the ecological footprint) of major nuclear power countries, such as France, the USA, Canada, China, and Russia during 1990–2021. To this end, we utilize the CS-ARDL procedure because of the endogeneity, common correlation, non-stationarity in data and heterogeneity in panel units. We contribute to considering the supply side dynamic of environmental degradation parameter, the load capacity, from the perspective of the top nuclear power nations that deviates our analysis from the prevailing scholarly works. However, our findings confirm a significantly positive impact of renewable and nuclear energy on the load capacity factor in improving environmental safety. Besides, economic growth and urbanization negatively affect the load capacity dynamics in spurring environmental degradation. Our findings are robust across an alternative estimation technique, namely the Dumitrescu and Hurlin (DH) causation analysis. Therefore, we recommend formulating pragmatic policies to deter the detrimental effects of income and urbanization by properly utilizing sustainable energy resources to conserve the natural environment.

Keywords

• Renewable energy
• Economic growth
• Urbanization
• Load capacity
• Environmental degradation
• Top nuclear power countries