Past, present and future environmental footprint of the Danish wind turbine fleet with LCA_WIND_DK, an online interactive platform

Romain Besseau, Romain Sacchi, Isabelle Blanc and Paula Pérez-López

Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 2019, vol. 108, issue C, 274-288

Abstract: Renewable energy systems are promoted and developed notably due to their low environmental footprint. Fleet-wide robust environmental assessments are needed to drive the sustainable transition of energy systems worldwide. This study introduces a tailored comprehensive impact assessment methodology for fleets of renewable energy systems based on Life Cycle Analysis and its application to Danish wind turbines fleet through an online platform LCA_WIND_DK (viewer.webservice-energy.org/lca-wind-dk/). This platform enables to visualize environmental performances of wind turbines in Denmark and their temporal evolution. The fleet is known in detail from 1980 to 2016 and projected from 2017 to 2030 based on national objectives for onshore/offshore capacity and pre-approved offshore projects. Each turbine's future electricity production is estimated from its power curve and geo-localized wind time-series. More than 10,000 cradle-to-grave life cycle inventories are generated, considering the spatio-temporal context and technological characteristics. The comprehensive analysis of the Danish fleet over fifty years reveals long-term trends for several impact categories. Improvements in all categories follow similar trends as in climate change, which decreases from 40 to 13 g CO2-eq/kWh between 1980 and 2030. Improvements stem from combined economies of scale and higher load factors linked to increasingly large and powerful turbines. The interactive mapping tool LCA_WIND_DK may provide statistics to support renewable energy oriented policy scenarios and unique spatio-temporal environmental information to project developers. This novel approach designed for large territories, here applied to the Danish wind turbine fleet, is generic and can be applied to other renewable energy systems and/or to other territories.

Keywords: Wind turbine; Danish fleet; Environmental performance; Dynamic; Future projections; Multicriteria life cycle assessment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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DOI: 10.1016/j.rser.2019.03.030

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