Dealing with future developments of wind offshore energy: How to asses environmental aspects?

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a standard methodology to assess the environmental impacts of technologies. Many LCA studies prove that wind energy has a low impact on climate change and, thus, is often suggested for the decarbonization of the electricity sectors in different countries. In addition, the LCA studies provide indicators of the environmental performance during the construction, installation, and operation of wind turbines. Yet, these indicators might capture technology development of wind energy meagerly because of the LCAs static approach that depends on the database for background data and is often much older than foreground data. In the meantime, technology evolves and innovates. That is why the integration of LCA indicators into energy systems models is not straightforward. Energy system models provide scenarios that address different visions of the future. Therefore, the environmental aspects of energy systems should grasp technological development, if possible, from two perspectives. First, the life cycle inventory (LCI) should include changes in the foreground according to the future development of the most relevant parameters. Second, the LCI should consider technical and temporal adjustment of background processes, like the market share of resources and utilities. This study focuses on the inventory of wind offshore electricity generation and considers upscaling of wind turbine components. This work applies the scenario development method for wind offshore energy in Germany using the Superstructure approach in the LCA opensource software Activity-Browser, which employs future LCI provided by the Premise initiative. The study sets up scenarios adapted for Germany to reflect expected future trends for wind offshore. The aim is to obtain specific impact indicators and integrate them into an electric system model for assessing optimal operation strategies for future power plant fleets regarding economic, technical, and environmental aspects.