Life Cycle Assessment of Wind Turbine 1

Introduction
High amount of greenhouse gases and carbon dioxide are released in the environment due to
heavy reliance on fossil fuel based electricity. Increasing concern and security issues
surrounding fossil based energy have led to the growth of an alternative source of renewable
energy, including wind energy.
Extracting energy form the wind is not a new idea by any means. Since early recorded
history, people have been harnessing the energy of the wind, for example, mill grain, sailing
of boat and to pump water. Wind power has been used for over a 1000 years and prior to
industrial revolution, wind mills were a key source of power for many decades if not
millennia. The first known wind turbine designed to produce electricity was built in 1888 by
Charles F. Brush, in Cleveland, Ohio; it was a 12-kW unit that charged batteries. (Spellman,
2014)
Presently, Wind energy, is one of the most promising renewable energy sources. The
global wind industry has achieved 25% year on year growth and on the end of 2009
represented 160 GW of installed capacity and has exceeded 200 GW in 2010. The World
Wind Energy Association predicts that global wind energy installed capacity will continue to
double every 3 years and is expected to reach 1900 GW by 2020.
A phased programme to develop wind energy in India started as early as 1985 and
today the total installed capacity has reached 22597 MW as per the Indian Wind Turbine
Manufacture Association (IWTMA). Currently electricity energy produced through wind
power accounts for 65% of total generation capacity based on renewable energy source.
It is now well known fact that during operation wind turbines are environment
friendly and releases no direct emissions. It has been shown that the majority of
environmental impacts of wind power plants result from the manufacture and installation
processes (Pehnt, 2006). As all forms of energy generation require the conversion of natural
resource inputs, they are attendant with the environmental impacts. Thus, consistent means
for assessing and comparing energy generation types is crucial to ensuring that decisions for

Life Cycle Assessment of Wind Turbine 2

energy system investment, planning, and development are made in the most informed manner
(Varun et al., 2009).
The objective of the work reported herein is to study a comparative LCA work for two
potential wind turbines. One is large wind farm power turbine (4.5 MW) and other is smaller
turbine (250 W) found in low energy buildings.

GLOBAL ANNUAL INSTALLED WIND CAPACITY

60000
50000
40000
30000
20000
10000
0

Source: Global Wind Energy Council (Units in MW)

GLOBAL CUMULATIVE INSTALLED WIND CAPACITY

400000
350000
300000
250000
200000
150000
100000
50000
0

Source: Global Wind Energy Council (Units in MW)

Life Cycle Methodology

Life Cycle Assessment of Wind Turbine 3

Life cycle assessment (LCA) offers such an approach to identifying the potential
environmental impacts associated with the energy systems and to improve their sustainability
performance form the early development phases (Li et al., 2010). The knowledge of LCA
helps us to evaluate the environmental impacts caused by a product or a process. A life cycle
approach involves a cradle to grave assessment, where the product is followed form its raw
material extraction through production, use and end of life. LCA guidelines have been set
forth by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO 2006) in the ISO 14040
standard.
The LCA methodology consists of four major steps.
1. The first one is the definition of the goal and scope of the analysis. This includes the
definition of a reference unit: all the inputs and outputs are related to this reference.
2. The second step in the inventory analysis, also called life cycle inventory (LCI),
which is based primarily on systems that exchanges inputs and outputs. In LCI, the
product system is defined which includes setting the system boundaries, designing the
flow diagrams with unit processes, collecting data for each of these processes and
which emissions will occur.
3. The next step is the impact assessment. This includes the impacts in terms of
emissions and raw material depletions.
4. The last step is to compare with other processes offering a similar utility and have a
critical view of these previous steps. This is referred as to the interpretation step [6-10
B. tremeac]
Environment and Energy Evaluation:
Evaluation of energy and environmental impacts of wind turbine need some indicators, which
may be called as LCA indicators and interpretations. They are as given below:
1. Primary Energy Demand:
i.
It is cumulative primary energy demand throughout the life cycle of energy
ii.

demand.
It is the total energy required to produce the material of construction for the
wind power plant.

Life Cycle Assessment of Wind Turbine 4

2. Energy payback time [EPBT] :
i.
The period required for the renewable energy system to generate the same
amount of energy (in terms of primary energy equivalent) that was used to
ii.

produce the system itself.

It is the number of years required to recover all the energy invested during the

iii.

erection of plant i.e. manufacturing, transportation, operation, dismantling etc.

It is the ratio of primary energy consumed during LCA to wind turbine

iv.

production per year.

To determine the energy payback time, we estimate the wind turbines initial
cost, annual energy cost saving and annual operating cost. So we can
formulate it as below:
EPBT = Total initial cost / (annual energy cost saving-Annual operating

cost)
3. Intensity Index
It is ratio between primary energy consumed or the CO2 emissions, and the electricity
produced during the wind turbine life time. It is calculated at the end life of the wind
turbine. These two indexes are called: energy intensity and CO2 intensity.
2. Case Study