Wind Energy: Supply Chain Deep Dive Assessment

Abstract

The report "America's Strategy to Secure the Supply Chain for a Robust Clean Energy Transition" lays out the challenges and opportunities faced by the United States in the energy supply chain as well as the federal government plans to address these challenges and opportunities. It is accompanied by several issue-specific deep dive assessments, including this one, in response to Executive Order 14017 "America's Supply Chains," which directs the Secretary of Energy to submit a report on supply chains for the energy sector industrial base. The Executive Order is helping the federal government to build more secure and diverse U.S. supply chains, including energy supply chains.To combat the climate crisis and avoid the most severe impacts of climate change, the U.S. is committed to achieving a 50 to 52 percent reduction from 2005 levels in economy-wide net greenhouse gas pollution by 2030, creating a carbon pollution-free power sector by 2035, and achieving net zero emissions economy-wide by no later than 2050. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) recognizes that a secure, resilient supply chain will be critical in harnessing emissions outcomes and capturing the economic opportunity inherent in the energy sector transition. Potential vulnerabilities and risks to the energy sector industrial base must be addressed throughout every stage of this transition. development of this report-including federal agencies, state and local governments, U.S. industry, national labs, researchers, academia, and non-governmental organizations. DOE also issued a request for information (RFI) to the public on energy sector supply chains and received comments that were used to inform policy strategies and recommendations in this report. The authors particularly acknowledge the below contributors and reviewers, Dr. Tsisilile Igogo a detailee at the DOE's Office of Policy for her guidance and leadership, and the 17 organizations that submitted wind-specific input to DOE's Supply Chain Request for Information for their valuable insight. Other experts and individuals who provided valuable insight are

2023 Critical Materials Strategy

“…A list of candidate materials was first derived from these DOE supply chain assessments. These reports cover technologies such as carbon capture (Suter et al, 2022), the electric grid including transformers and highvoltage direct current (DC) transmission (Nguyen et al, 2022), energy storage , fuel cells and electrolyzers , hydropower including pumped storage hydropower (Uría-Martínez, 2022), rare earth (RE) magnets , nuclear energy (Finan et al, 2022), platinum group metal catalysts (Smith, Graziano, et al, 2022), semiconductors , solar photovoltaics (PVs) (DOE, 2022a), and wind energy (Baranowski et al, 2022). The initial list of materials was further refined after consultation with experts from various DOE offices.…”

“…Since the last DOE CMS report, several major global events have significantly affected global material supply chains. The Covid-19 pandemic has lengthened the lead time for multiple energy products due to labor shortages (Nguyen et al, 2022;Uría-Martínez, 2022), material shortages (Baranowski et al, 2022;Shih, 2020), reduced capacity , or delayed capacity development (Turk & Kamiya, 2020). Additionally, Russia's invasion of Ukraine has limited both the amount of energy and the supply of some materials to the U.S. and European countries, including of natural gas, crude oil, coal, palladium, nickel, corn, wheat, timber, and fertilizers (Fyfe, 2022).…”

Large Castings for Wind Turbines

“…Wind turbines in the United States are produced from a combination of domestic and foreign components. The share of domestic production varies between components; for example, about 70% of towers are sourced domestically, whereas only 36% of generators come from U.S. manufacturers (Baranowski et al 2022). All large castings are currently imported; however, innovative manufacturing techniques could potentially enable the development of U.S. supply chains for these components.…”

Initial Heliostat Supply Chain Analysis

“…As part of ongoing work with DOE, NREL will publish deep dive assessments for key technologies in the United States. Both PV and wind assessments have been published (Basore and Feldman 2022;Baranowski et al 2022). Recent work has also looked at the offshore wind supply chain needs in the United States (Shields et al 2022).…”