Raygoza-Limón, M.E., Trujillo-Hernández, G., Amezquita Garcia, J.A., Mercado-Herrera, A., Orduño Osuna, J.H. and Murrieta-Rico, F.N. (2026) ‘Assessing bioenergy sustainability through integrated environmental, social, and techno-economic dimensions’, Academia Green Energy, 3. https://doi.org/10.20935/AcadEnergy8138.

Raygoza-Limón and colleagues reject single-metric sustainability by treating bioenergy as a coupled environmental, social, economic, technological and regulatory system. Their systematic review harmonises life-cycle assessment, social life-cycle assessment, techno-economic analysis and institutional evidence published between 2010 and 2025. The iconic result is conditionality: bioenergy is not sustainable by category. Waste- and residue-based systems frequently outperform crop-based fuels, while land-use change, fertiliser emissions, labour vulnerability, biodiversity pressure and policy instability can undermine nominal carbon benefits. Methodologically, the paper makes trade-offs explicit by comparing greenhouse-gas reductions, energy returns, cost ranges, governance conditions and technological maturity. Sustainability therefore becomes a portfolio property requiring alignment across dimensions rather than optimisation of one indicator. The wider bridge is to systems assessment, circular economy and transition governance, where technological performance is understood as inseparable from land, labour, institutions and the standards through which environmental claims are calculated.

van der Wel, K., Akerboom, S. and Meijer, A. (2024) ‘A public values perspective on energy justice: Building a theoretical lens for understanding decision-making in the energy transition’, Energy Research & Social Science.

Van der Wel, Akerboom and Meijer address a persistent problem in energy justice: even when justice is publicly acknowledged, institutional decisions can still produce unjust outcomes. Their key contribution is to analyse energy transition through public values theory rather than treating justice as an isolated criterion. Decision-makers operate within plural value environments in which affordability, reliability, sustainability, security, efficiency and participation may compete. Justice can therefore be overlooked, misunderstood or explicitly subordinated. Methodologically, the paper proposes a three-step approach: map the public values at stake, identify which values are actively pursued and examine how conflicts among them are balanced. This turns value conflict into an observable decision process rather than a moral afterthought. The bridge to public administration and governance theory is precise: energy transition becomes a problem of institutional prioritisation, showing that infrastructure outcomes reflect the procedures through which competing public goods are made commensurable and politically actionable.

Sovacool, B.K., Carley, S. and Kiesling, L. (2024) ‘Energy justice beyond the wire: Exploring the multidimensional inequities of the electrical power grid in the United States’, Energy Research & Social Science, 111, 103474.

Sovacool, Carley and Kiesling displace energy justice from household affordability toward the full material geography of the electrical grid. Their central proposition is that transmission and distribution infrastructure cannot be treated as equity-neutral simply because electricity itself is physically fungible. Grid investment, blackout exposure, siting burdens, ecological disruption and future climate risk are distributed unevenly. The article organises these inequalities through demographic, spatial, temporal and interspecies dimensions, thereby making justice a property of infrastructure across multiple scales. Methodologically, it uses a whole-systems perspective and a series of concrete cases to connect technical components—lines, substations, transformers and corridors—to differentiated social and ecological consequences. The wider bridge reaches infrastructure studies, climate justice and political ecology: energy systems become visible as territorial arrangements whose reliability, risks and externalities are socially allocated, making engineering decisions inseparable from questions of distribution and responsibility.