(533i) A Life Cycle Assessment Study of Wind Power Based Multi- Source Energy Systems

Environmental impact has become one of the most important issue in developing new energy systems under the strengthening international regulations due to increasing financial costs caused by climate change.

The emission amount of carbon and other greenhouse causing materials should be carefully calculated to mitigate the impact of global warming. Due to global disasters caused by climate change, it has become clear that there should be no exemptions in the effort to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases.

Rigorous analysis should be conducted covering the entire life span of the corresponding energy system including the site preparation, construction, operation and decommission to assess their environmental carbon footprint. Besides, parts and materials should be closely monitored including their manufacturing and associated supply chains.

Recently many wind power generation facilities have been constructed as a non-fossil fuel energy source. Obviously there are many advantages in using the wind power: no raw materials should be purchased once it has been set up, no emission of environmentally hazardous gases, etc. With the decreasing power generation cost by using wind power, the size of wind power generators is increasing. The off shore wind turbines are actively built around the world. At the same time, attention has been given to take the best utilization of redundant energy from renewable energy sources including wind powers. One promising alternative is to transform the redundant electricity into hydrogen and use it as transportation energy source.

Some countries including South Korea, Japan, etc. are actively preparing hydrogen based transportation energy system as an alternative to gasoline based ones. This work is motivated by the need that such an effort should be carefully reviewed to prevent the unexpected troubles that are often encountered.

This paper investigate the overall process of site preparation, construction, operation and decommissioning of wind power turbine, electrolysis and hydrogen refueling station. Land and sea transport were considered for some parts from the manufacturing sites to the construction and setup sites. It was inevitable to make some assumptions because it is not possible to gather up-to-date information on some of them. The computation has been made by replacing them as globally used alternatives.

A case study addressing an energy system including on-shore wind power generation farms in the Gyeongbuk region of South Korea is presented in this paper. The case study of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of the energy system has been conducted by using widely used commercial LCA software of SimaPro. Lessons learned during the field study have been discussed as well as limitations of the current case study.

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by Korea Institute of Energy Technology Evaluation and Planning (KETEP) grant funded by the Korean government (MOTIE) (No. 20214000000010, NRF-2020R1I1A3A04038008).