Land use impacts the environmental benefits of wind energy farms in China

Wind energy plays a vital role in meeting rising electricity demand and climate goals, but its land-use footprints from vegetation removal, construction, and road sprawl may overestimate greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation benefits. Here we used life cycle assessment (LCA) to explore the land-use impacts on GHG emissions and energy performance for three typical wind farms located in forest, grassland and desert ecosystems. We incorporated vegetation/soil removal during the installation stage, and the loss of additional carbon sink capacity during the operation and maintenance stage. Land-use change (LUC) contributed 37.9% of the life cycle emissions for the forest farm, while much lower for the grassland and desert farm (4.3% and 1.2%, respectively). Grassland deployment offered a triple win with highest energy return, lowest land-use intensity, and lowest GHG emissions. With mitigation measures, all farms achieved low emission intensity (below 5 g CO2-eq kWh−1), greatly reducing land-use and ecosystem-based emission intensity differences. In China, land-use emissions account for 38 percent of the lifecycle carbon footprint for wind farms in forest ecosystems, but only 4 percent for grasslands and 1 percent for deserts, according to a life cycle assessment method that incorporates ecosystem carbon losses.