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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.
Erdoğan et al. (Sun,) studied this question.