LCA-based Carbon Footprint of a Typical Wind Farm in China

Wind power resources are abundant in China, with the reserves and exploitable capacity ranking the first in the world. The carbon footprint is used to provide an expending scale accounting of carbon emission embodied in relative phases and sectors. In order to account the carbon footprint of wind farm, this paper introduces a method combining the Life Cycle Assessment and Input-Output analyses to calculate the overall carbon footprint in the construction, operating and dismantling phases of a typical wind farm in China on the basis of the latest acquirable input-output table of province level and province energy statistic. As a result, the total carbon footprint of the case wind farm is 14,490 tCO2 all over the 21 years lifetime. Due to a mass of steel and copper was consumed to manufacture the wind turbines, the ‘Smelting and Pressing of Metals’ sector discharged the largest amount of CO2among all economic sectors. Considering the character of wind farm, IO-LCA is an appropriate method to analyze the overall direct and indirect carbon emissions of wind farm.