Location: WECC, US only - Western Electricity Coordinating Council, US part only
This dataset represents the production of high voltage electricity at onshore grid-connected wind power plants with a capacity of less than 1 MW in US - Western Electricity Coordinating Council in 2012. It includes operation and maintenance expenditures as well as infrastructure inputs. Wind load hours have been adapted to local conditions (see parameters).
At the moment, the class of onshore < 1MW wind turbines is approximated with a 0.8 MW onshore wind turbine consisting of the infrastructure datasets for 'moving parts' and 'fixed parts'. Moving parts are the rotor, the nacelle, electronics, and the network connection. The tower and foundation are considered as fixed parts.
According to The Wind Power Database (2014), total installed wind capacity on-and offshore in US - Western Electricity Coordinating Council in the end of 2014 amounted to 66708.243 MW. Out of it, 0% were installed offshore, which are modelled with a 2 MW wind turbine. Percentages of the three onshore wind power plant classes modelled in ecoinvent referring to the total installed capacity (1031 windfarms by 12/2014): <1MW 7.7%; 1-3MW 91.5%; >3MW 0.8% [Retreived from The Wind Power. 2014. Wind power and wind farms database. www.thewindpower.net, Status December 2014]. Values valid for TOTAL US, not only for this NERC region.
[This dataset is meant to replace the following datasets:]
Undefined unit processes (UPRs) are the unlinked, multi-product activity datasets that form the basis for all of the system models available in the ecoinvent database. This is the way the datasets are obtained and entered into the database by the data providers. These activity datasets are useful for investigating the environmental impacts of a specific activity (gate-to-gate), without regard to its upstream or downstream impacts.