Wind Technology Assessment

Researchers:

Onshore and offshore is widely promoted as a important means to reduce harmful environmental impacts of electricity generation, particularly the avoidance of climate changing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Governments worldwide support renewable energy by the mandating of renewable portfolio standards, tax incentives and feed-in tariffs. Due in part to government support and also to large reductions in turbine costs, the global installed capacity of wind systems is increasing rapidly.

The energetic and carbon footprint of wind energy systems is dependent on a number of factors: efficiency, lifetime, capacity factor, and energetic cost of turbines. This study explores the landscape of energetic and climate performance of a variety of different wind technologies. You can explore this data using the interactive dashboard below. The data for the analysis can be downloaded from this link.

This work is published as a chapter in Wind Energy Engineering: a Handbook on On-shore Turbines.