Welcome to LCA_WIND_DK

---

Environmental footprint of wind turbines in Denmark.

---

LCA_wind_DK is a visualization tool that displays environmental performance indicators for wind turbines in Denmark using life cycle assessment.

The method used by this tool relies on the inclusion of technological parameters to determine the material and energy requirements to build, transport, erect, maintain and discard a wind turbine. It also accounts for time and space-related parameters that affects the performance of a wind turbine, such as the wind availability but also the year of manufacture and operation.

Should you be interested in knowing more about time, geography and space-sensitive life cycle inventories of wind turbines:

Romain Sacchi, Romain Besseau, Paula Pérez-López, Isabelle Blanc, Exploring technologically, temporally and geographically-sensitive life cycle inventories for wind turbines: A parameterized model for Denmark, Renewable Energy, Volume 132, 2019, Pages 1238-1250, ISSN 0960-1481, doi.org/10.1016/j.renene.2018.09.020.

and

Romain Besseau, Romain Sacchi, Isabelle Blanc, Paula Pérez-López, Past, present and future environmental footprint of the Danish wind turbine fleet with LCA_WIND_DK, an online interactive platform, Renewable & Sustainable Energy Reviews, online, 2019, doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2019.03.030.

Add one or several wind turbines.

---

Instant energy and environmental characterization of additional wind turbines

---

An upcoming function will allow users to drag-and-drop additional wind turbines of various sizes, nominal power ranges, types, at different points in time and in various locations. It will return the expect electricity production and environmental footprint of the project. It will consider the influence of temporally, technologically and geographically-sensitive parameters set by the users on each step of the life cycle.

Developers

Methods and data

---

---

Data sources

---

The past, current and future composition of the fleet of wind turbines in Denmark relies on listings contained in the Danish registry of wind turbines, made available by the Ministry of Energy. The registry also gives the annual electricity production of each wind turbine that has or is being operated. Future electricity production has been estimated from the power curve of the wind turbine and projected wind availbility, using the re-analysis model MERRA-2.

The material and energy requirements to build the inventory of wind turbines are mostly based on manufacturers data, synthesized in the TheWindPower database, as well as the life cycle inventory database ecoinvent. Scaling models are used when manufacturers data is not available.

---

Tool

---

The life cycle assessment tool Brightway2 is used to calculate the material and energy requirements for each wind turbine along its life cycle.

---

Impact characterization

---

Energy and material requirements are normalized down to a kilowatt-hour of electricity and characterized against different impact assessment methods: IPCC's Global Warming Potential (referred here as "Carbon footprint"), ILCD's Minerals resource depletion as well as the Energy payback ratio.

---

Web tools

---

The javascript interactive map library Leaflet is used to map out the wind turbines.

The web framework Django is used to generate and serve results at the users' request.

Publications

---

An in-depth description of the approach and tools used is available in the following publications:

Romain Sacchi, Romain Besseau, Paula Pérez-López, Isabelle Blanc, Exploring technologically, temporally and geographically-sensitive life cycle inventories for wind turbines: A parameterized model for Denmark, Renewable Energy, Volume 132, 2019, Pages 1238-1250, ISSN 0960-1481, doi.org/10.1016/j.renene.2018.09.020.

and

Romain Besseau, Romain Sacchi, Isabelle Blanc, Paula Pérez-López, Past, present and future environmental footprint of the Danish wind turbine fleet with LCA_WIND_DK, an online interactive platform, Renewable & Sustainable Energy Reviews, online, 2019.