Siemens wind announces life cycle valuations

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Siemens has issued a comprehensive performance data with details on carbon savings and payback times for geared as well as direct drive wind turbines in offshore and onshore projects.

The four Environmental Product Declaration brochures published are based on Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) of four defined Siemens wind power projects.

It consists of two offshore wind plants with 80 wind turbines and two onshore wind projects with 20 wind turbines.

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LCAs are instrument for finding out the energy payback time of a power generation system with the amount of time a plant need to operate to produce as much energy as it consumes.

In addition, they supply environmental savings data of large-scale wind power systems over their lifetime.

Environmental product declarations provide customers, developers and authorities the requested transparency on the environmental performance of these products and they help to further develop the portfolio, thereby ensuring competitiveness, said, Markus Tacke, chief executive, Siemens Wind Power and Renewables.

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An onshore wind farm having 20 Siemens SWT-3.2-113 wind turbines displays an energy payback time of 4.5 months.

During the entire life-cycle it will produce 57 times more energy than it uses and just four grams of carbon per kilowatt/hour of electricity generated, compared to 865 g/kWh for a fossil fuel plant.
This return is calculated considering all factors like manufacturing, installation, operations and maintenance of the wind farm in a 25-year life cycle.

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On examining an offshore wind project, even greater savings can be found with 80 Siemens D6 wind turbines.

In 20 years, these projects produce 53 million MW and save 45 million tons of carbon, equal to the amount of carbon absorbed by a forest with an area of 1,286 square km over 25 years.

The Environmental Product Declaration brochure states this figure corresponds to a CO2 emission of only seven g/kWh compared to the 865 g/kWh found with average global fossil power production.

Sabeena Wahid
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