Enabling social conditions shaping value creation in Renewable Energy Communities using Business Model Life Cycle Assessment

Other conference contribution, 2026

Assessing the sustainability of Business Models (BM) has gained increasing attention, with a wide range of BM sustainability assessment approaches proposed to analyse how organisations create, deliver and capture value in more sustainable ways. However, most of these approaches rely primarily on qualitative assessments and provide limited insight into how strategic BM choices translate into measurable sustainability impacts. In contrast, conventional Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) offers robust quantitative environmental evaluation but remains predominantly product-oriented, making it ill-suited to capture sustainability outcomes driven by BM strategies such as circular practices, cooperative structures or community-based energy models. Business Model Life Cycle Assessment (BM-LCA) addresses this limitation by integrating BM analysis and LCA, linking environmental impacts to the value creation logic of the BM.
This paper demonstrates how information generated during BM-LCA such as, Sustainable Business Model Canvas (SBMC) characterisation, transaction modelling, coupling and sensitivity analysis, can be leveraged to structure social reflection. These elements provide a structured representation of the BM, revealing socially relevant dependencies embedded in its configuration and supporting interpretation beyond environmental and economic results.
Within the interpretation stage of BM-LCA, a set of context-specific social indicators is used to support structured social reflection. The twelve indicators proposed for Renewable Energy Communities in the Basque Country are not part of the BM-LCA method itself, but are informed by insights generated through its application. They provide an interpretative lens to explore how social conditions embedded in the business model influence environmental and economic results, and how changes identified through BM-LCA may, in turn, affect social dynamics. The indicators are therefore illustrative and context-dependent, rather than a universal or standalone social assessment framework
Using the Ixotzen REC (Gipuzkoa, Basque Country, Spain) as an empirical case, the indicators illustrate how social dependencies, organisational strengths, and potential vulnerabilities can be incorporated into BM-LCA interpretation. The paper advances the BM-LCA methodology by extending its application beyond environmental–economic assessment and strengthening its role as a quantitative approach that explicitly integrates social reflection in sustainability-oriented contexts.