Track: Energy

Abstract

Wind power is a renewable energy source, which is relatively evenly distributed over many regions of the world. Wind power plant requires no fuel input to produce electricity, thus, wind energy is emission free during its conversion process. However, manufacturing of wind power plant components such as turbine requires several materials, processes, energy, transports, natural resources, and disposal stages during its whole life cycle stages. For a complete understanding of impacts of electric energy generation using wind turbine, it is necessary to analyze the emissions and other impacts over the entire life cycle stages of a wind turbine. This study makes a complete Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) of wind energy to determine the impacts for each functional unit (i.e. 1 kWh of electric energy) over the entire life cycle of a wind turbine. LCA tool SimaPro has been employed to define the scopes and goals of the analysis and to perform inventory and impact assessment. Data has been collected from Ecoinvent database sources. This study found that overall negative impacts for electric energy generation are 1.58 Pt (Pt is a unit for environmental loading) and 339.8 Pt for wind source and energy mix in Malaysia, respectively. This study results mean that electric energy generation using wind turbine has much less negative impacts than fossil based energy mix.