Renewable energy: incorporating climatology into environmental assessments

Jessica Loriaux, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen

The environmental impact of a renewable energy technology considers the materials used and emissions over a full life cycle, and its performance in terms of power generated during its lifetime. The performance of renewables such as wind, solar or hydropower installations is dependent on weather conditions, which vary in space and time. Our aim is to perform environmental assessments of renewable energy technologies and determine the variability of these assessments on the global scale, which will allow us to identify regional differences. For this purpose, we combine information on the technical specifications and materials used with climatological data. During this presentation I will focus on our current work on wind turbines, consisting of an analysis of the influence of technological and climatological (both spatial and temporal) variability on their environmental performance, and the sensitivity of the results to the resolution of the climatological data.