Mineral import demand and wind energy deployment in the USA: Co-integration and counterfactual analysis approaches

Wind energy, a captivating parameter of clean energy transformations, requires abundant metallic minerals to operate its technologies: wind cells, wind turbines, wind generators, turbine blades, etc. Thus, the mineral-driven wind energy generation process thrives the worldwide mineral import flows. Within the import demand function analysis, we scrutinize the mineral import demand’s response to the USA’s wind energy installation capacity from 1996 to 2020. We utilize the dynamic autoregressive distributed lag (DARDL) simulation technique to check for the co-integrating association between mineral imports and wind power installation capacity within the purview of the oil and mineral prices, exchange rates, and income factors. Our findings demonstrate a significant long-term relationship between mineral import demand and wind power installed capacity in the USA. Besides, mineral price does not sustain the Marshallian demand hypothesis, and oil price holds the substitution effect proposition in the long and short run. In addition, the exchange rate remains trivial in the long run but significantly consequential in the short run to influence mineral imports. Finally, the income dynamic substantially fosters mineral import growth in the USA. Our results remain robust across the kernel-based ordinary least squares (KRLS) machine learning algorithm approach. Therefore, we suggest elevating imported metallic minerals for clean energy transitions by producing the optimal size of wind energy in the USA.