Forecasting End-of-Life Wind Turbine Material Flows in Australia Under Various Energy Transformation Scenario

A circular economy requires managing and reducing the environmental and social impacts of products and materials across their lifecycle from production to end-of-life, including clean energy technologies. The unprecedented growth in wind turbine (WT) deployment in Australia as a clean energy system is promising with over 9 gigawatts (GW) installed by 2022. Responsible management of wind turbines across the whole supply chain including at end-of-life is important to avoid the potential environmental burden associated with significant waste volumes and to identify resource recovery opportunities. As the first step toward this aim, this paper provides a holistic outlook of the current and future WT installations and the projected future waste volumes under five national energy system transformation scenarios. The projected cumulative WT installation capacity will be between 13 and 38 GW by 2041. Accordingly, the volume of the cumulative WT waste is projected to vary between 6.69 and 19.76 million tonnes for the “slow change” scenario (creating the lowest volume of waste) and the “step change” scenario (creating the highest volume of waste), respectively. Significant cumulative waste volumes are expected at more than one million tonnes by 2030. The projected waste stream will rapidly increase, including a wide range of materials, predominantly concrete at 10.20 million tonnes, followed by 3.21 million tonnes of steel in 2061. Also, there will be some other valuable materials like Rare Earth Elements and composites which despite their smaller volumes are very important in terms of environmental, economic and supply chain security impacts. This significant amount of waste material represents a resource recovery opportunity and highlights the importance of a circular economy approach for wind energy systems that considers the whole supply chain from production to end-of-life