There is a consensus within the scientific community regarding the effects on the environment, health, and climate of the use of renewable energy sources, which is characterized by a rate of harmful polluting emissions that is significantly lower than that typical of fossil fuels. On the other hand, this transition towards the use of more sustainable energy sources will also be characterized by an increasingly widespread electrification rate. In this work, we want to discuss whether electricity distribution and transmission networks and their main components are characterized by emissions that are potentially harmful to the environment and human health during their operational life. We will see that the scientific literature on this issue is rather limited, at least until now. However, conditions are reported in which the network directly causes or at least promotes the emissions of polluting substances into the environment. For the most part, the emissions recorded, rather than their environmental or human health impacts, are studied as part of the implementation of techniques for the early determination of faults in the network. It is probable that with the increasing electrification of energy consumption, the problem reported here will become increasingly relevant.
Keywords: battery; electric distribution; electric transmission; pollution; power cable; sensor; switch; transformer.