This comparison of five power plants in West Texas is intended to provide various decision-makers and stakeholders with a holistic picture of the life-cycle environmental impacts associated with these power plants. A key contribution of this analysis is that we assumed all power plants generate the same amount of electricity over a 30-year life, taking a 500 MW combined-cycle gas turbine (CCGT) plant as a benchmark. Also, in two cases, we added battery storage to wind and solar PV facilities to render them nearly as dispatchable as the CCGT. We included the entire supply chain supporting electricity generation, which encompassed raw material sourcing, processing, manufacturing, operations, and product end of life, also called “cradle to grave”. We report on 18 environmental impacts using ReCiPe midpoint (H) impact assessment. The supply chains are global, and impacts are felt differently by host communities across the world. The results can help stakeholders identify hotspots across numerous supply chains with the highest environmental impacts. We discuss some remedial measures and challenges to inform future analysis by the research community.

Wind turbines are reaching end-of-life in increasing volumes, presenting a growing sustainability challenge. In the United States, prevailing waste management practices, primarily landfilling, undermine circular economy objectives by discarding recoverable materials and energy. This study applies life cycle assessment (LCA) to quantify 16 midpoint environmental impacts across three end-of-life pathways—landfilling, recycling, and repurposing—of major turbine components (steel, concrete, and composite blades). An avoided burden approach is used to quantify environmental credits from substituting recovered materials for virgin equivalents. Results show that nearly all recycling and repurposing pathways outperform landfilling across most impact categories. Mechanical recycling of both glass and carbon fiber blades performed better than landfilling in all 16 categories, while pyrolysis and solvolysis improved outcomes in 14–15 of 16 categories (CO₂ eq emissions were higher for pyrolysis and solvolysis than for the landfilling option). Repurposing blades likewise showed broad advantages (15 of 16 categories; ozone depletion was slightly higher), extending material lifetimes before waste treatment. For conventional materials, steel and concrete recycling reduced impacts in most categories, with concrete outperforming landfilling in 15 of 16 categories (marine eutrophication was nearly equal to the landfilling option). The only mixed pathway was cement co-processing of GFRP, which split evenly between benefits and burdens. Sensitivity analysis underscores that improving the quality of recovered materials is critical to maximizing environmental benefits. Overall, both recycling and repurposing offer substantial environmental advantages over landfilling, reinforcing the importance of circular end-of-life strategies in sustaining wind energy across its full life cycle.

We compared 16 life-cycle environmental impacts, covering emissions to air, land and water environments, for three plausible grid-mix evolution scenarios between 2023 and 2050 in the ERCOT electric power system in Texas. All environmental impacts were assessed for local and global supply chains needed for each generation technology. Each generation-mix scenario was required to remain reliable over this period, as tested using an hourly cost production (dispatch) model in 5-year increments from 2030 to 2050. To isolate the impact of changing generation mixes, we kept all other key assumptions (e.g., demand growth and fuel prices) the same across the three scenarios. Results indicate tradeoffs across 16 environmental categories. Given global supply chains and different timing of capacity expansion and retirement under the three scenarios, these impacts were distributed temporally and spatially. Most impacts are local and realized in the short term, whereas climate change and ozone depletion are global and occur over longer term. Although many environmental impacts from wind, solar, and battery storage technologies were higher during the upstream phase (resource extraction and processing, equipment manufacturing, plant construction), thermal power plants that combust coal and natural gas exhibited significant impacts during the operation phase and, in some categories, exceeded impacts from wind and solar power plants over their entire life cycle. These tradeoffs are valued differently by host communities, which can delay and increase costs of projects and undermine the effectiveness of energy-transition policies.

Societies need a practical way to assess total costs of future energy mixes in complex power systems. To demonstrate such an approach, we assess the cost of electricity in the ERCOT system across two distinct generation mix scenarios, varying mostly by wind, solar and gas-fired generation, between 2023 and 2050. We use commercial software, also used by system operators and power plant developers, to ensure that evolving generation mixes in both scenarios can meet electricity demands at all times at all nodes. Such jurisdiction-specific, hourly nodal dispatch modeling is recognized as necessary for more accurate representation of costs to maintain reliable operations in complex electricity systems. We capture generation and some system costs, which we call consumer cost of electricity, CCOE, given that end-users pay these costs under different line items in their electricity bills. CCOEs are insightful cost estimates for system planning and policy discussions for a given power system and must be recalculated for different scenarios as technologies, market designs, policies, and more, change. This can be done as part of routine annual or bespoke analyses conducted by system operators.

We discovered a minor mistake in our modeling of the lithium component of the Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) that was used in this manuscript