Life cycle technology assessment provides a conceptual structure for different ecological, economic and social impact assessment (SIA) tools for acting together in determining the importance, size, or value of ecological, economic and social impacts of technology - doing and making things with materials and energy. In compatibly incorporating SIA with Material /Substance Flow Analysis, Life Cycle Assessment and Life Cycle Costing, different views of SIA are studied. An important difference between this exercise and conventional SIAs is that in the former case, there is no official plan or intention of implementing the technology in a specific time and place. This poses operational difficulty due to the poor knowledge about the community that will be affected by the technology in question. Besides, compatibility with LCA adds complexity associated with a requirement for the SIA to account for a number of communities associated with each portion of the life cycle. Thorough analysis of the opportunities and challenges involved led to the use of zooming analogy. Based on this analogy, in the absence of knowledge of detailed spatial and temporal coordinates of a specific community that will be affected by the technology, a reasonable level of zooming out is done. This enables identification and characterization of the most important social impact variables for the given technology in the zoomed out area ( e.g. say a country or region of a country). As an illustration, one variable from each of five categories of SIA variables will be used to characterize the social impacts of energy technologies in small municipalities in Sweden. These categories are population impacts; community and institutional arrangements; communities in transition; individual and family impacts; and community infrastructure needs. The knowledge from damage-based weighting of environmental impact categories using concepts such as Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALY) will be tested in characterizing the variables.