A System Dynamics Model for Assessing Dynamic Rare Earth Production, Demand and U.S. Wind Energy Demand
This project is not currently supported by Idaho National Laboratory as production grade software but is being made available to the public. Please use at your own risk.
This is a System Dynamics Model for Assessing Dynamic Rare Earth Production, Demand and U.S. Wind Energy Demand
Global initiatives are focused on deploying clean energy technologies, such as wind energy, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. U.S. onshore and offshore wind targets have been particularly aggressive. Some wind energy technologies, such as direct-drive wind turbines, rely on a volatile and Chinese-concentrated rare earth element (REE) supply chain. Global efforts have been made to develop new sources of REEs, with limited success. This lack of rare earth availability has been suggested to inhibit direct-drive adoption, despite its energy efficiency benefits. However, it is unclear if new U.S. REE supply could adequately support onshore and offshore direct-drive wind energy growth, and help meet U.S. wind energy targets. This model estimates U.S. and Chinese REE availability that could support U.S. direct-drive and other REE demand.
Detailed description of the model can be found in our published article at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421517307383 It is noted that although the paper described in detail the dynamic wind energy demand in section 3.2.2, this portion of the paper was coded in Mathematica. Only the output of the Mathematica model was used in this model to calculate US onshore direct drive capacity demand based on Total neodymium availability.
Idaho National Laboratory would like to thank Purdue University (Dr. Aditya Vedantam and Dr. Ananth Iyer) and Colorado School of Mines (Dr. Maxwell Brown and Dr. Rod Eggert) for their valuable inputs to the model.
Users are required to download a free version of Powersim to run the model.http://www.powersim.com/main/download-support/
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Copyright 2018 Battelle Energy Alliance, LLC
Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at
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Contact information of authors: Ruby Nguyen: ruby.nguyen@inl.gov Idaho National Laboratory, P.O. Box 1625, MS 3710, Idaho Falls, ID 83402