The clock may also be ticking for the wind power industry, so action is needed. For instance, Danish wind turbine manufacturer Vestas leads a new initiative entitled “CETEC”, which aims to make blades fully recyclable.ĭanish wind turbine blade manufacturer LM Wind Power is engaged in the “ZEBRA” project, which brings together industrial companies and technical centers to demonstrate on a full scale the technical, economic, and environmental relevance of thermoplastic wind turbine blades, with an eco-design approach to facilitate recycling.Īnother recycling initiative, “DecomTools”, aims to devise and develop eco-innovative concepts to reduce the cost of decommissioning, minimize the environmental footprint and increase the know-how and expertise of involved stakeholders. Many of the DecomBlades partners already work dedicated with blade recycling. The consortium seeks to investigate and develop solutions to recycle the composite material in wind turbine blades. Ørsted is already contributing to advance the technologies that can recycle wind turbine blades in a sustainable way as a founding partner of the cross-sector DecomBlades consortium consisting of 10 wind industry companies and research institutions. With its ambition to install 30 GW of offshore wind and 17.5 GW of onshore energy production by 2030, Ørsted believes they have a clear responsibility to help find solutions to the challenge of recycling blades. Up until now, the company has only decommissioned the offshore wind farm Vindeby in Denmark – by the way, the world’s first offshore wind farm (1991) – where the blades from the 11 wind turbines were all reused. Ørsted has so far constructed 7.5 GW of offshore wind and 1.7 GW of onshore wind. ![]() In June 2021, Danish renewable energy company Ørsted committed to either reuse, recycle, or recover all the wind turbine blades in its global portfolio of onshore and offshore wind farms upon decommissioning. Danish wind industry all in on circularity ![]() In the coming decade, wind turbines will be deployed at an unprecedented pace, delivering clean renewable energy to industries and to several hundreds of million people, making it even more important to discharge the blades in a sustainable way. Consequently, most decommissioned blades are landfilled today. However, recycling wind turbine blades remains a challenge, as the blades are designed to be lightweight, yet durable, making them challenging to break apart. There are already mature technologies that use blades as feedstock in cement co-processing, for instance, and the ‘granulates’ of recovered fiberglass and other materials put through mechanical grinding can be used for a range of new products. Less fully understood is that to achieve the much-sought-after “100 per cent recycling” milestone, we still need to find a sustainable after-life solution for the blades.īlades are, in fact, fully recyclable, as Recharge News has reported. It is well-known within the wind power industry that as much as 90 per cent of a turbine can be recycled. ![]() All of this raises the question of what to do with the dismantled turbines. In some repowering projects, turbine decommissioning is required even before reaching 20 years. Europe has about 3,800 coming down annually through at least 2022, according to BloombergNEF. alone, about 8,000 aging blades will be removed annually in the coming years. ![]() This happens because the wind energy industry has been struggling to find sustainable solutions for accumulating quantities of worn-out wind turbine blades.Ī great number of turbines are approaching the end of their initial 20-25 years life expectancy. During the past couple of years, media reports have uncovered how old wind turbine blades are piling up in landfills in Texas, Wyoming, Iowa, and other places, creating so-called “wind turbine graveyards”.
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