The Energy Return on Investment of Whole-Energy Systems: Application to Belgium.

Planning the defossilization of energy systems while maintaining access to abundant primary energy resources is a non-trivial multi-objective problem encompassing economic, technical, environmental, and social aspects. However, most long-term policies consider the cost of the system as the leading indicator in the energy system models to decrease the carbon footprint. This paper is the first to develop a novel approach by adding a surrogate indicator for the social and economic aspects, the (EROI), in a whole-energy system optimization model.