Does mineral-driven renewable energy production promote sustainable development? Uncovering the moderating role of economic development

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.