Study On Ecological Footprint Analysis Of The Wind Farm Based On Emergy Analysis

Energy plays an important role in the economic development and well-being of countries around the world,but the excessive use of natural resources affects all living and non-living environmental components.With economy developing,the world is facing with an energy crisis.As the global energy crisis worsens,more and more attention are paid on the development of renewable energy.According to the national ecological civilization construction and the response to climate change,wind power has always been regarded as clean energy resource.The main input of wind farms is wind,so wind farms basically do not directly emit pollutants,then little consideration is given to their ecological costs and environmental effects.However,from the perspective of resource conservation,wind farms directly or indirectly occupy a large amount of land resources during their entire life cycle,which causes some problems on the current shortage of land resources in China.In order to explore the direct and indirect land occupancy of wind farms and assess the sustainable development of them,this paper calculated the ecological footprint of a wind farm based on emergy analysis and evaluated its sustainability.This study divided the entire life cycle of the wind farm into four phases:wind turbines production and transportation,infrastructure construction,operation and maintenance,and disassembly and recycling.Through calculating the materials and energy consumption of the four phases,the emergy ecological capacity of the wind farm was 3789.57 hm~2/a,while the emergy ecological footprint was 5117.59 hm~2/a.The calculation results showed that the wind farm is in an ecological deficit state.In addition,among the four phases,the ecological footprint of infrastructure construction was the largest,accounting for 60.93%,followed by the wind turbines production and transportation(33.77%),followed by the operation and maintenance stage(4.59%)and the disassembly and recycling stage(0.71%).The main contributions to the large ecological footprint of the wind farm were steel,concrete,ecological protection investment,fiber glass,land occupation and epoxy resin.According to uncertainty analysis and scenario analysis,it was found that the solar transformities of steel and concrete had the greatest impact on the uncertainty of ecological footprint accounting.When 62%of the recycled materials are used in wind turbines production,the wind farm can maintain ecological balance.The more recycled materials invested in fan production,the more sustainable the wind farm will be.Reducing the consumption in steel,concrete,ecological protection investment,glass fiber and land use will also reduce the ecological footprint of wind farms?Improving technology,changing production processes,using lightweight materials,and reducing materials consumption are effective ways to reduce the ecological footprint of wind farms.