Renewable Energy Materials Properties Database (REMPD)
Wind Quantity Dataset
The REMPD material quantity dataset for wind power plants includes two types of utility-scale wind energy systems: land-based and offshore. The wind turbine characteristics for each type of plant are based on reference turbines developed by the International Energy Agency Wind Task 37. For land-based wind, they assume a geared turbine with a turbine rating of 3.4-MW (Bortolotti et al. 2019). For offshore wind, they assume a direct-drive turbine with a 15 MW turbine rating (Gaertner et al. 2020).
Table 3 in the Wind Overview section documents the component and subassembly organizational structure, along with the references used to calculate material quantities for wind energy technologies.
Material Quantities for A Single Wind Turbine
Download DataThe material quantities needed to construct a single wind turbine are based on reference wind turbine characteristics that were developed by the International Energy Agency Wind Task 37. For land-based wind, they assume a geared turbine with a turbine rating of 3.4-MW (Bortolotti et al. 2019). For offshore wind, they assume a direct-drive turbine with a 15 MW turbine rating (Gaertner et al. 2020).
Please refer to Table 3 in the Wind Overview section for a summary of data sources used to compute the material quantities listed here.
Material Quantities for A Single Wind Plant
Download DataThe material quantities needed to construct a single wind plant are based on reference wind turbine characteristics that were developed by the International Energy Agency Wind Task 37 and wind plant sizes from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's Annual Technology Baseline. For land-based wind, they assume a 201 MW plant comprised of fifty-nine 3.4-MW, geared wind turbines. For offshore wind, they assume a 1005 MW plant with sixty-seven 15-MW, direct-drive turbines supported by fixed-bottom monopile substructures.
Please refer to Table 3 in the Wind Overview section for a summary of data sources used to compute the material quantities listed here.
Projected Annual Material Quantities for All U.S. Wind Plants
Download DataWe use the REMPD's scenario analysis capabilities (described in the Wind Overview) to estimate projected annual material quantities for all U.S. wind plants under two future wind deployment scenarios: Current Policies and High Deployment (refer to the Wind Overview for more details; Table 3 in the Wind Overview section also summarizes the data sources for the material intensities that are used to estimate the material quantities reported here).
Material Quantity (billions of kg per year)
Estimated annual quantity of material (in billions of kg) needed to meet U.S. wind energy demand.
Capacity MW / year
The annual wind energy generation capacity projection that is used to estimate the projected annual material quantities for all U.S. wind plants.
As described in the Wind Overview section, these capacity projections are based on data from NREL's NREL's Standard Scenarios and Denholm et al. (2022). The sharp changes in annual wind deployment are a result of the modeling methods and assumptions used in those studies.
Table Dataset
Full dataset to sort and filter for material quantity and energy capacity per year.
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