Denmark’s Orsted has said it would “reuse, recycle, or recover” all turbine blades in its worldwide portfolio of wind farms once they’re decommissioned. The world’s largest offshore wind farm developer said it had “a clear responsibility to help find solutions to the challenge of recycling blades.” The issue of what to do with wind turbine blades when they’re no longer needed is a headache for the industry. This is because the composite materials blades are made from can be difficult to recycle, with Orsted noting that “most” blades, once decommissioned, were landfilled.
As governments around the world attempt to ramp up their renewable energy capacity, the number of wind turbines globally looks set to increase. The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, said that in the offshore sector alone it wants capacity to hit at least 60 gigawatts by 2030 and 300 GW by the middle of the century.
The U.K., which left the EU at the end of January 2020, wants its offshore wind capacity to reach 40 GW by 2030. The U.S. is also looking to significantly increase its offshore wind capacity this decade. Given the above, the problem of what to do with turbine blades will become even more pressing going forward. For its part, Orsted explained it would “temporarily store” decommissioned blades if finding a solution to recycling them took “longer to solve than anticipated.”