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Facilitated by the environmental goals set by the government, wind turbines will be one of the main pillars of the future electricity production in Germany. In this paper, a comprehensive assessment of the future metallic raw material requirements for the development of the German wind energy sector was conducted, which is closely based on the current and future market conditions. Copper and dysprosium are identified as the most critical materials since they face the possibility of supply bottlenecks while being fundamental to the functionality of wind turbines. While the cumulative demand for copper may require 0.2% of the current known reserves, the demand for dysprosium may reach up to 0.6% of the reserve levels. Both metals clearly exceed the allocations for renewable energy technologies in Germany and would face strong competition from other sectors in securing raw materials. Although recycling is able to reduce the bottleneck risks, it does not completely mitigate them. More efforts are therefore required to improve material efficiency by means of alternative turbine designs, efficient production techniques, highly reliable components and material substitution.

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A material flow model for the production of Bifacial Selective Emitter 60-cell p-type Cz PERC (Passivated Emitter and Rear Contacted) glass-backsheet modules with aluminium frame was built. The selected module represents mature technologies in the PV industry and their manufacturing is considered to take place in China in a production cluster with an annual module capacity of 5 GWp. In a first step, data acquisition and validation for wafer, cell and module fabs took place. The data were used to generate the reference system lifecycle inventories (LCI) and extended waste databases for the reference wafers, cells and modules. A set of potential circularity actions, such as the vertical integration of the operations and waste revalorisation strategies, had been proposed and their environmental performance and cost assessed by means of a life cycle assessment (LCA) and a total cost of ownership (TCO). Our results show that 87% of the waste can be reduced and revalorised, this represents a circular flow of raw materials of 18,756 Mg per year from a 5GWp PV module production cluster. Environmental impact reductions of 0.6–2.3% are estimated for different impact categories. We also estimate a cost reduction potential of 2.59% from total module costs.