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Critical materials as well as rare earth elements and precious metals such as platinum, gold and silver are used significantly for computer hard disk drives, mobile phones, hybrid electric vehicles, batteries, renewable energy system and many other applications. It is therefore important to quantify and estimate both current stocks and flows of such materials, as well as future requirement for industries and economies. In this study, which is focused on wind energy system in the European Union (EU) 27, the current consumption and future requirement of critical and precious materials were calculated and estimated using the wind power production dataset from ecoinvent and data from National Renewable Energy Action Plan (NREAP). It is shown that fluorspar has been the most consumed material to date, and will probably be the most required material in the future. Among other critical and valuable materials, the main materials used for current wind energy system are silver, magnesium, indium, gold and tantalum. These materials will also be required significantly by 2020 for the wind energy system in the EU 27. It is argued that these results should be connected to the future energy and material policy and management.

The Irish government has undertaken to reduce national CO2 emissions through a range of measures put out in their Biomass Action Plan and the National Renewable Energy Action Plan. The conversion of peat fired power plants to co-fire with renewable biomass is one of these. This paper considers how the adoption of sweeping policies impact on other actors presently supplying or utilizing woody biomass resources. The SAWMILL sector (18 sawmills), BOARD sector, 3 board plants, and ENERGY sector (3 peat fired power stations) were included in a Linear Programming (LP) based transportation study. Specific transport costs between each residue producing sawmill and each board and energy plant were modeled and used in finding the minimum delivered cost for a number of scenarios. Scenario 2015 represented the status quo, while Scenario 2030 represented a situation with 30% co-firing with woody biomass equivalents in the energy plants. For each time horizon, the problem was solved from the perspective of society at large (GLOBAL), for the benefit of the board sector (BOARD) or with emphasis on minimizing the cost to the energy sector (ENERGY). The cost of transporting alternative sources of renewable energy was varied between €100 and €500 TJ−1. Results showed how overall supply costs increase with increasing alternative energy cost, but also how the dynamics between sectors focus worked. The cost of transport to the Energy sector ranged from €306,043 to €996,842 in Scenario 2015, while the increased demand in 2030 led to a range of between €1,132,831 and €4,926,040, depending on the alternative cost selected. For the Board sector, whose absolute demand remained constant, the total transport cost ranged between €868,506 and €3,454,916 in Scenario 2015. The unchanged demand showed that the transport costs also remained the same for the 2030 Scenario, however, the optimization focusing on the Energy sector, increased the delivery cost to the Board sector by up to €693,730 per year by 2015 and €842,271 per year by 2030, indicating how intervention would be necessary if political ambitions of a 30% co-firing should happen without detriment to other important wood based industries. Science Foundation Ireland Charles Parsons Energy Research Programme Bioenergy Innovation Centre CenBio project COST Action Coford, The National Council for Forest Research and Development