Hydropower refurbishment is increasingly recognized as a key strategy for maintaining renewable electricity generation and minimizing the environmental and social impacts of developing new infrastructure. With much of the global hydropower fleet approaching or exceeding its original design life, refurbishment decisions must strike complex trade-offs between technical performance, environmental impacts, economic viability, and social acceptability. This review provides a comprehensive summary of the scientific and policy literature on sustainable hydropower refurbishment, with a particular focus on the integration of life cycle assessment (LCA) and multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) from a circular economy perspective. The study systematically reviews the latest results in the fields of environmental LCA, life cycle costing (LCC), social LCA (S-LCA), and integrated life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA), highlighting their application in the refurbishment and modernization of hydropower plants. The results show that construction-related impacts, particularly those associated with concrete and steel, dominate the environmental load over the life cycle, making refurbishment and component recycling highly effective strategies for reducing embodied emissions. The integration of LCA and MCDA allows for the transparent prioritization of refurbishment alternatives by explicitly considering stakeholder preferences and trade-offs between environmental, economic, social, and technical criteria. Overall, the results support the use of integrated, multi-criteria life cycle frameworks as reliable decision-making tools for managing sustainable hydropower refurbishment and long-term energy system resilience.
Lakatos et al. (Tue,) studied this question.