Updated Life Cycle Inventories Data of Wind Power

The project involves a comprehensive update of the life cycle inventories (LCI) for electricity generation from wind power in the Swiss and European context. This ensures that the FOEN life cycle inventory database will be aligned with the current state of wind power technology.

Two photos of exemplary wind farms: an onshore wind farm on green hills with five wind turbines, and an offshore wind farm on the high seas with more than ten wind turbines.

Result

Key data

Result

The updated datasets result in greenhouse gas emissions from wind power ranging between 10.4 and 22.7 g CO₂-eq. per kWh. Offshore wind generally has higher impacts due to vessel activities than onshore wind, despite higher capacity factors.

The Swiss wind mix yields 18.1 g CO₂-eq/kWh, higher than the European average of 14.9 g CO₂-eq, due to lower capacity factors and smaller turbines. The total environmental impact and the cumulative energy demand for the Swiss mix are also 13–16% higher than for the European mix.

A comparison with other technologies highlights that wind power remains among the electricity generation technologies with the lowest climate impact and also shows the lowest overall environmental impact according to the Ecological Scarcity Method.

Description

The project comprises a comprehensive update of the life cycle inventories (LCI) for electricity generation from wind power in the Swiss and European context. The updated LCI cover onshore and offshore wind farms with turbine capacities ranging from 2.3 MW to 15 MW.

In total, 39 datasets were created, including infrastructure datasets, electricity production datasets at the wind-farm level, and aggregated electricity mixes for Switzerland and Europe. These inventories comply with the FOEN database protocol and are based on the reference year 2024.