Does mineral-driven renewable energy production promote sustainable development? Uncovering the moderating role of economic development
Journal of Environmental Management, vol.391, 2025 (SCI-Expanded, Scopus)
- Publication Type: Article / Article
- Volume: 391
- Publication Date: 2025
- Doi Number: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2025.126598
- Journal Name: Journal of Environmental Management
- Journal Indexes: Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED), Scopus, Academic Search Premier, International Bibliography of Social Sciences, PASCAL, Aerospace Database, Agricultural & Environmental Science Database, Aqualine, Aquatic Science & Fisheries Abstracts (ASFA), BIOSIS, CAB Abstracts, Communication Abstracts, Environment Index, Geobase, Greenfile, Index Islamicus, Metadex, Pollution Abstracts, Public Affairs Index, Veterinary Science Database, Civil Engineering Abstracts
- Keywords: Critical minerals, Cross quantilogram, MQQR, Renewable energy, Sustainable development
- Open Archive Collection: Article
- Azerbaijan State University of Economics (UNEC) Affiliated: No
Abstract
Due to increasing environmental pressures, energy transition has become one of the most urgent policy tasks for decision-makers, and renewable energy is at the heart of the energy transition strategies. However, renewable energy technologies are heavily dependent on critical minerals and elements. One can query whether resource-dependent renewable energy production can create desired environmental impacts to ensure sustainable development. Therefore, the primary motivation of this research is to investigate how mineral-dependent renewable energy production impacts environmental sustainability, proxied by using the Load Capacity Factor (LCF), and whether economic development (GDP) can play a moderating role in Germany by adopting country-level analysis and utilizing the Cross Quantilogram (CQ), bivariate Quantile-on-Quantile regression (QQR), Quantile regression (QR), and recently proposed novel Multivariate Quantile-on-Quantile regression (MQQR). CQ estimations denote that mineral-driven renewable energy generation, GDP, and LCF have heterogeneous quantile dependences and tend to have negative dependencies at higher quantiles. Bivariate QQR results show cobalt-graphite-, copper-, and nickel-driven renewable energy production have a limited positive impact on the LCF and can be described on a knife-edge. In contrast, rare earths-driven renewable energy can create undesired environmental consequences. Besides, QR results significantly confirm QQR results; thus, the robustness of QQR results is confirmed. Lastly, MQQR results show that GDP can play a moderating role in the impact of mineral-driven renewable energy generation on LCF. Policy outcomes of the empirical analysis have been provided in the body of the text.