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Danish company Orsted said Thursday it will “reuse, recycle or recover” any turbine blades in its global portfolio of wind farms after decommissioning.
The world’s largest developer of offshore wind farms said it had “a clear responsibility to find solutions to the rotor blade recycling challenge”.
The industry is worried about what to do with wind turbine rotor blades when they are no longer needed. This is because the composite blades are difficult to recycle. Orsted noted that “most” blades were sent to landfill after they were shut down.
As governments around the world try to expand their renewable energy capacity, the number of wind turbines around the world is expected to increase.
In the offshore sector alone, the European Commission, the executive branch of the EU, wants to achieve a capacity of at least 60 gigawatts by 2030 and 300 GW by the middle of the century.
The UK, which left the EU at the end of January 2020, aims to reach 40 GW of offshore wind capacity by 2030. The USA also intends to significantly increase its offshore wind capacity this decade.
With this in mind, the problem of what to do with turbine blades will become even more pressing in the future. For his part, Orsted stated that it would “temporarily store” discarded blades if the search for a recycling solution took “longer than expected”.
A number of companies in the industry have tried to find solutions to the problem in recent years. In January 2020, the wind energy giant Vestas announced that it would produce zero-waste wind turbines by 2040.
Last December, GE Renewable Energy and Veolia North America signed a “multi-year agreement” to recycle blades removed from onshore wind turbines in the United States.
It was recently announced that science-industry collaboration will focus on recycling fiberglass products, a move that could ultimately help reduce wind turbine blade waste.
Orsted, Vestas and LM Wind Power – part of GE Renewable Energy – are also part of the DecomBlades consortium, an initiative that focuses on the recycling of rotor blades.
