Shota Furuya

Pieces日本語版

Doesn't manufacturing wind turbines emit CO₂ and consume rare earths?

“Building a turbine emits a lot of CO₂.” “Neodymium magnets use so much rare earth material that it can hardly be called green.” Concerns about the manufacturing stage come up regularly in discussions of wind power. As with solar panels, the instinct that emitting CO₂ in manufacturing defeats the purpose runs deep, and on social media you find claims that a single turbine takes decades of generation to pay back.

The short answer. (1) Life-cycle emissions for onshore wind are about 11–12 gCO₂/kWh, and for offshore about 12 gCO₂/kWh, which is a seventieth to a ninetieth of coal’s 820–1,050 gCO₂/kWh. (2) Energy payback takes six to nine months onshore and twelve to fifteen offshore, so most of a 20–25 year life is net positive generation. (3) Neodymium magnets in direct-drive turbines do contain rare earths, and this is where wind differs decisively from solar. (4) Even so, only about 30–35% of turbines are direct-drive; the rest are geared and use no rare earths. What follows separates the numbers from the arguments.

Life-cycle emissions and energy payback

The standard method is life-cycle assessment, counting raw materials, components, transport, construction, operation, decommissioning and disposal. On the IPCC’s AR5 (2014) and UNECE (2022) syntheses, emissions per kWh are 11–12 gCO₂/kWh for onshore wind and about 12 gCO₂/kWh for offshore — the lowest of any commercial generation (IPCC, 2014; UNECE, 2022). That is level with nuclear (5–12 gCO₂/kWh) and below solar (20–50 gCO₂/kWh).

The payback figures are more intuitive still. The environmental product declaration for Vestas’s V150-4.5 MW onshore turbine puts the energy of manufacturing back in about seven months (Vestas, 2023). Offshore machines in the 12–14 MW class such as GE’s Haliade-X take twelve to fifteen months (Bonou et al., 2016; GE Renewable Energy, 2022). With operating lives of 20–25 years onshore and 25–30 offshore, more than 95% of a turbine’s life is spent producing net energy. The claim that manufacturing consumes so much energy as to make the exercise pointless does not describe modern large turbines.

What a turbine is made of

By weight, a 3 MW onshore turbine including tower, nacelle, blades and foundation is typically 66–79% steel, 11–18% concrete in the foundation, 2–3% composites in the blades, about 1% copper, about 1% aluminium, and under 0.1% permanent magnet material where it is used (IRENA, 2022; WindEurope, 2023). More than 80% by weight is steel, concrete and copper — common materials with established recycling chains.

The issues concentrate in the generator inside the nacelle. There are two families. Geared machines — induction or wound-rotor synchronous generators — use no rare earths. Direct-drive machines, with permanent magnet synchronous generators, use neodymium magnets: 150–200 kg per MW, containing about 30% neodymium, 1–6% dysprosium, a few per cent praseodymium and a little terbium (IEA, 2023).

Direct-drive accounts for about 30–35% of new turbines worldwide, rising to around 70% offshore, where less maintenance is worth paying for (IEA, 2023; BloombergNEF, 2024). Which means about two-thirds of the world’s turbines use no rare earths at all. “Wind power is a rare-earth-intensive industry” is half right and half wrong.

The rare earth problem and dependence on China

Rare earth supply is more concentrated than solar’s supply chain. China accounts for about 60–70% of mining and 85–90% of refining and separation, and for about 92% of permanent magnet manufacturing (USGS, 2024; IEA, 2024a). Deposits exist in the United States, Australia, Vietnam and Malaysia, and Mountain Pass in the US and Lynas in Australia are mining and separating, but dependence on China will not fall quickly.

Dysprosium, added so that magnets hold their strength at high temperatures, is the most exposed element of all: about 99% of world production comes from China and Myanmar. In response, Vestas, Siemens Gamesa and GE have moved to dysprosium-free magnets and to grain-boundary-diffusion magnets that cut dysprosium to a third or less, with Chinese manufacturers such as Goldwind doing the same. Heavy-rare-earth-free ferrite magnets and superconducting generators are in research, so rare earth use per turbine should fall further over time.

Rare earths as a critical mineral question should be treated across sectors — EV motors, appliances, defence — rather than as a wind problem. Wind accounts for only about 15–18% of world neodymium demand (IEA, 2024a); the largest users are EVs and appliances. The idea that wind power will exhaust the world’s rare earths only makes sense if you ignore cars, phones and air conditioners.

Geographic concentration and the supply chain

Beyond rare earths, China’s presence in turbine manufacturing itself is growing. Six of the ten largest turbine makers are Chinese, and Chinese manufacturers account for about 60% of new capacity worldwide (BloombergNEF, 2024). In European and American markets, however, Vestas (Denmark), Siemens Gamesa (Spain/Germany) and GE Vernova (United States) still dominate: the concentration is nothing like solar’s.

In offshore wind, the supply chain bottleneck has moved to installation vessels and subsea cable. The shortage of wind turbine installation vessels is acute: each costs US$100–200 million, and even counting Europe, China, the United States and Japan together, a gap of 20–30 vessels is projected for 2030 (DNV, 2024). Japan has brought Shimizu’s BLUE WIND and the CP-16001 of Penta-Ocean and Kajima into service, and supply remains tight.

The policy responses are the US Inflation Reduction Act, the EU’s Net-Zero Industry Act and the UK’s contracts for difference, most recently the AR6 round. Japan’s METI and transport ministry have set a target of 30–45 GW by 2040 with 60% domestic content in their offshore wind industry vision, and Toshiba, Hitachi, JFE and Sumitomo Electric are entering turbine components, foundations and subsea cable.

Blades: disposal and recycling

The technically hard part of a turbine is disposing of and recycling the blades. Blades are glass- or carbon-fibre reinforced plastic, built light and strong with thermoset resins. Thermosets cannot be remelted once cured, which historically left only landfill or incineration. Some 43 million tonnes of blade waste are expected worldwide by 2050, and handling it is a question of the industry’s credibility (WindEurope, 2023).

The turning point came in 2021, when Siemens Gamesa introduced the world’s first recyclable blade commercially, followed by Vestas in 2023 with a chemical process that breaks down conventional blades completely. Vestas’s process returns thermoset resin to monomers under mild conditions and could make landfill and incineration unnecessary. GE Vernova is working with BASF on mass production of thermoplastic blades, and the industry is converging on a target of 85–95% recyclability for new blades by 2030 (WindEurope, 2024).

The EU introduces a ban on landfilling blades from 2025, and Germany, the Netherlands, Austria and Finland have already banned it nationally. In Japan, the scheme requiring funds to be set aside for decommissioning renewable installations entered full operation in 2024, obliging FIT and FIP operators to accumulate disposal costs through withholding. NEDO projects are demonstrating cutting, grinding and use as cement feedstock, with Taiheiyo Cement and Mitsubishi Materials trialling blades as alternative fuel in cement kilns.

Objections, limits and common misreadings

Several caveats belong here.

First, clean is not the same as no impact. Iron ore mining, coke smelting and cement production still depend on fossil fuels and will not fall to zero. A large tower for a 5–15 MW machine needs 500–1,000 tonnes of steel, so without green steel — hydrogen-based reduction — wind’s LCA will plateau.

Second, LCA figures come in ranges. Wind conditions at the site, the power mix where components were made, transport distance and recycling assumptions move onshore figures across 8–20 gCO₂/kWh. It pays to check the assumptions rather than treat one number as absolute.

Third, ecosystems, landscape and local agreement at the installation stage remain separate from manufacturing emissions — the territory of zoning and nature-positive energy. Effects on birds and bats, low-frequency noise, coexistence with fisheries: all deserve their own assessment.

Fourth, social acceptance and governance. Pollution and labour conditions in rare earth mining regions (Inner Mongolia, Jiangxi, Myanmar) and the risk of blades being dumped illegally are problems of institutional design, not technology. Solvable in principle, they feed the belief that wind cannot be trusted when the rules lag.

What matters next in Japan

Three points. First, information literacy. Claims that building a turbine emits enormous CO₂, or that neodymium will run out, are far from what the data shows. Payback is six to fifteen months, and two-thirds of turbines use no rare earths — that is where the discussion should start.

Second, rebuilding a domestic and near-domestic supply chain. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Hitachi left turbine manufacturing in the 2010s, leaving Japan heavily dependent on foreign machines. But Japanese firms remain competitive in the surrounding industries — towers, foundations, subsea cable, installation vessels, construction — and the 30–45 GW offshore target is an opportunity to rebuild that base.

Third, making disposal and recycling work. The first large wave of onshore decommissioning arrives in the 2030s, with offshore following a decade later. Blade recycling technology, the operation of the funding scheme, and traceability against illegal dumping are the foundation of the industry’s credibility.

Summary

  • Life-cycle emissions are 11–12 gCO₂/kWh onshore and about 12 offshore, a seventieth to a ninetieth of coal’s — the lowest of any commercial generation.
  • Energy payback takes six to nine months onshore, twelve to fifteen offshore; most of a 20–25 year life is net positive.
  • More than 80% by weight is steel, concrete and copper. Rare earths are confined to direct-drive machines, 30–35% of the total.
  • Direct-drive uses 150–200 kg of neodymium magnet per MW, but dysprosium-free and ferrite magnets are displacing that.
  • The real risk is less “scarce metals” than China’s grip on rare earth supply (60–70% of mining, 85–90% of refining) and blade disposal.
  • Blade recycling has seen breakthroughs since 2021, with 85–95% recyclability as the industry target for the 2030s.

The instinctive worries — heavy CO₂ in manufacturing, heavy consumption of rare earths — both miss the reality by a wide margin on current data. The questions that matter are the geopolitics of rare earth supply, the technology and rules for blade recycling, and coming to terms with ecosystems and communities where turbines are built — governance and supply chain policy rather than technology. Those questions apply to every source of electricity, nuclear, fossil and solar included. Wind is not a special case.

References and data sources

Life-cycle analysis and EPBT

Critical minerals and supply chains

Turbine manufacturing, installation and blade recycling

Policy and industry

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