Sustainability discourse in business and government has come to be dominated in recent years by the twin-pillars of circular economy and renewable energy. Namely, the need for society to transition to a ‘circular’ economy driven entirely by renewable energy in order to address the existential threat of climate change. From a resource and sustainability perspective, the circular economy is an approach to product and service delivery that looks to maximise the value inherent in the materials and equipment used across its lifetime, ensuring businesses’ ability to recover and reuse/remanufacture/recycle these assets when they are no longer fit for their original purpose. Underpinning this shift is the underlying assumption that all remanufacturing and recycling processes will be powered by renewables, in order to fully “close the loop”. What is often omitted from this narrative, is the opportunity that this shift to a circular economy represents to the renewable energy transition (hint: the answer, in paragraph 5, is a reduction in the levelised cost of renewable energy and thus a quicker transition to renewables).

The energy sector - extraction & production, generation, transmission & distribution, heating & cooling, storage, and transportation - represents a vast array of materials, equipment and infrastructure worldwide that underpins the functioning of modern society, as well as its contribution to climate change, resource depletion, and loss of biodiversity. Like most industries, the energy sector (be it fossil-based or renewable) is built on a linear process (see Figure 1 below), that ultimately results in the costly need to dispose of waste materials and equipment.

Whilst highlighting the current linear process, the figure above also highlights 3 areas where the ‘circular economy’ can contribute to reducing the lifecycle costs of energy infrastructure:

Design for longevity and end-of-life i.e. maximise durability, whilst avoiding issues of non-recyclability, as with wind turbine blades and lithium-ion batteries

i.e. maximise durability, whilst avoiding issues of non-recyclability, as with wind turbine blades and lithium-ion batteries Retain ownership, or incentivise asset return, in order to recover the inherent material value of energy infrastructure through reuse, remanufacturing or recycling e.g. via ‘heat as a service’ like with Danish firm Best Green, or with Renault’s EV battery leasing model

e.g. via ‘heat as a service’ like with Danish firm Best Green, or with Renault’s EV battery leasing model Provide end-of-life routes for typical energy equipment and assets to avoid low-value scrappage or landfill e.g. Renewable Part Ltd’s wind turbine component recovery, remanufacture and resale, or the University of Strathclyde’s reprocessing solutions to recycle commonly difficult-to-treat materials like wind turbine blade glass-fibre reinforced plastics.

Ultimately these circular economy opportunities fall into two energy-specific categories:

“Incumbent opportunities”; that is, those systems that have already deployed and aren’t necessarily designed for end-of-life circular e.g. downcycling opportunities for wind turbine blades, second-life uses for batteries to avoid immediate landfill etc., and; “New deployment opportunities”; that is, ensuring future energy asset deployments are circular by design. This is particularly pertinent to the future of the solar, wind and battery storage sectors, which represent a growing end-of-life recycling challenge (see Figure 2 below).

What is unique to the energy sector, is not only can we estimate the end-of-life materials opportunity based on average asset lifetime (as with the blade waste estimates for the UK in Figure 3 below), but the sector is ‘captive’ when it comes to future deployments. That is, in order to meet national and international climate targets to (hopefully) avoid environmental calamity, there is a relatively clear direction of travel with regards to a transition to renewable energy, and the need to deploy specific solutions to meet this challenge e.g. wind turbines, solar panel, heat pumps, energy efficiency retrofits, battery storage, EVs etc. This knowledge provides government strategists, utilities, waste contractors, and entrepreneurs alike the opportunity to develop end-of-life solutions to reduce future lifecycle costs and bring value to incumbent energy waste streams (as with existing wind turbine blades and li-ion batteries), as well as design for the requisite deployment of new infrastructure whilst avoiding future end-of-life disposal challenges.

[Sources: author’s own estimates based on data from Variable Pitch, 2018; BEIS, 2018; RenewableUK, 2018, using Albers et al. (2009) formula (1 kW = 10 kg blade waste) and a 20 year lifespan; wind farm data valid as of early 2018]

This potential for reducing the end-of-life costs, and potentially improving operational returns (via servitisation models), ultimately represents an opportunity for circular economy solutions and business models to drive-down the levelised costs of energy (LCOE), which in-turn would make it cheaper to install the infrastructure and equipment required to transition to a fully renewable energy sector, which would in-turn support the underlying need for the circular economy to be run on renewables. Whilst the circular design and end-of-life routes for materials will be a means to an ends for many i.e. reducing the LCOE, it also represents new opportunities for both industry and government. For industry, circular economy models, such as with servitisation, represent an opportunity to generate ongoing revenue from “sticky”/repeat customers and to optimise the revenue-cost balance of their customer offerings. To government, circular economy approaches to the energy transition represent an opportunity to enable the rollout of traditionally expensive solutions such as low-carbon heating systems and insulation retrofits (as with business models such as those used by EnergieSprong), at a reduced cost to the public purse, or potentially even a net-positive one.

This opportunity to change our approach to the deployment, use and disposal of energy solutions represents a strange new world for the energy sector, and a great opportunity to power-up the energy transition through the application of circular economy thinking and solutions. Simultaneously, reducing the LCOE will help drive down the cost of circular economy solutions such as reprocessing, which in turn will reduce the levelised cost of renewables, a virtuous cycle. Ultimately, time is short to achieve the required transition to a renewable energy sector, with the circular economy providing another ace up our sleeve in the race to ramp-up renewables globally, whilst avoiding the simultaneous ramping-up of our waste. As they say, time will tell, but it feels like the renewable energy transition will need to be more circular in future.































