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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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With an increasing share of renewable energy technologies in our energy systems, the integration of not only direct emission (from the use phase), but also the total life cycle emissions (including emissions during resource extraction, production, etc.) becomes more important in order to draw meaningful conclusions from Energy Systems Analysis (ESA). While the benefit of integrating Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) into ESA is acknowledged, methodologically sound integration lacks resonance in practice, partly because the dimension of the implications is not yet fully understood. This study proposes an easy-to-implement procedure for the integration of LCA results in ESA based on existing theoretical approaches. The need for a methodologically sound integration, including the avoidance of double counting of emissions, is demonstrated on the use case of Passivated Emitter and Rear Cell photovoltaic technology. The difference in Global Warming Potential of 19% between direct and LCA based emissions shows the significance for the integration of the total emissions into energy systems analysis and the potential double counting of 75% of the life cycle emissions for the use case supports the need for avoidance of double counting.

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