The wind industry is on an ambitious growth curve. This will require millions of tonnes of materials and components to be deployed within the next six years up to 2030 with continued growth forecasts until 2050 at least.
Wind energy is growing rapidly globally, driven by climate action intended to keep global warming under 2⁰C and a renewed focus on energy security. This leads to an immense demand for materials and production capacities for scaling the wind market from currently 1 TW installed capacity globally to more than 6 TW in 2050.
At the same time, the first generation of wind energy infrastructure is reaching the end of its first service life. Globally, onshore wind decommissioning rates are forecast to grow from 20 GW in 2022 to just over 100 GW by 2028 and ~1,000 GW by 2047, with decommissioning activities mainly concentrating in China, United States, Germany and India. Decommissioning rates for offshore wind are more modest, reaching ~5 GW by 2030, doubling to ~10 GW by 2039 and reaching ~84 GW by 2050, with a new decommissioning market emerging primarily around the North Sea basin.
Resource use accounts for the largest environmental impact from the wind energy industry. Wind energy infrastructure is primarily made from foundation materials, such as steel, concrete, glass fiber, copper and aluminium. The growing scale of wind energy creates circular economy related sustainability challenges, such as increasing resource exploitation and competition, along with underdeveloped solutions for decommissioned components and materials.
There are significant opportunities to find sustainable solutions through circular economy approaches, such as design for durability, lifetime extension, material innovation, and growing end-of-use markets for turbine and component reuse and material recycling. This could result in local job opportunities, reduced pressure on production capacities, lower environmental footprints, cost savings and shorter delivery times for wind turbines and key components.
This TEM aims to discuss key topics, such as:
- State of play in research and practice for circular economy for wind
- Challenges in global material and component supply chains and the role circular strategies could play to overcome these
With possible further discussions covering:
- Circular design, especially standard and modular design which can ease transport, repair and remanufacturing and design with minimised and/or alternative materials
- Best practice in turbine reuse
- Refurbishment and remanufacturing opportunities
- Decommissioning and recycling infrastructure
- Environmental lifecycle performance
- Traceability and data sharing to enable circular wind
- Policy and regulatory enablers
- Business cases for investment and economic development strategies
The TEM will result in a list of potential partners for a new IEA Wind task on the topic, with insight into global interest for such circular wind supply chain task and understanding of the demand, and event proceedings shared with participants with summary points for public communications.
This TEM meeting will be scheduled to take place online in February 2026.