Over the coming decades, many scenarios rely on a massive deployment of renewable and low-carbon energy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while producing different energy carriers, such as heat, electricity, and fuels, to meet the energy needs of economic sectors. Regarding the global energy sector, its energy needs could increase significantly due to the energy-intensive production of materials used to construct new energy facilities and resource scarcity, thereby reducing the energy available to meet other sectors’ demands. This study aims to quantify the embodied energy associated with the construction of energy facilities based on the energy intensity of their main materials, i.e., the energy actually consumed for their manufacture in the form of energy carriers, in order to ultimately assess the energy sector’s energy needs. The energy intensity of a material relies only on its manufacturing energy requirements, regardless of how they are generated upstream. Thus, this approach differs from conventional LCA which considers the energy mix to count the energy consumed in its primary form. To calculate the energy intensity of materials, the proposed methodology relies on an LCA-type approach using the ecoinvent database to consider all processes, from ore mining to final shaping. It first identifies each step of the material’s manufacturing chain and its associated processes, such as melting or electrolysis, which require specific energy forms. Then, the embodied energy associated with the facility’s construction is obtained from its materials inventory. This study covers 30 key materials - including steel, concrete, lithium and silicon - selected for their critical role in the construction of energy facilities such as solar panels, wind turbines, power plants, or storage systems. The methodology, its application to the case of steel production, and its use to quantify the embodied energy of an offshore wind power plant are presented.
Cohen et al. (Thu,) studied this question.