By 2050, it is estimated that over 200,000 wind turbine blades will need to be recycled worldwide. These are huge pieces of composite plastic with a length of regarding a hundred meters or more. They will never decompose in the ground and are not meant to be recycled. Everything can change the development of the company Siemens Gamesa. The company came up with a technology for manufacturing recyclable wind turbine blades and started to their trials.
Image Source: Siemens Gamesa
Siemens Gamesa expects that by 2040 all parts of wind turbines will be recycled. Until recently, only blades might not be recycled from the large components of wind turbines, while nacelles, parts of generators and tower bodies might be recycled. To reuse the materials from which turbine blades were made – fiberglass, metal and plastic – it was necessary to develop a resin that was easily soluble in weak acidic solutions.
The resin formulation was developed by project partners Aditya Birla Advanced Materials and, moreover, was able to give it the ability to harden faster than a conventional formulation, which accelerated the production of blades. At the end of its service life, the blade made of recyclable material will be immersed in a weak acid, in which the resin will completely dissolve, freeing all the constituent components of the blades for reuse.
Image Source: RWE Renewables
Siemens subsidiary Gamesa is currently manufacturing 81 recyclable RecyclableBlades and plans to start manufacturing 108 and 115 blades. The first wind turbine with recyclable blades has started to feed electricity into the grid as part of an offshore wind farm in the North Sea (Kaskasi project with a planned installed capacity of 342 MW). By the end of the year, it is planned to launch 38 wind turbines with recyclable blades on the shelf.
If you notice an error, select it with the mouse and press CTRL + ENTER.
