Wind Industry decommissioning is a very different business to cessation of production and abandonment of oil and gas fields, whether on or offshore.
Broadly, Big Wind’s expectation is that most wind farm sites will evolve and grow in line with advances in turbine technology and society’s demand for more power; with operators seeking repowering and expansion consents for existing locations as necessary.
With oil and gas, the picture is different. Resources are finite with production from most fields following a familiar bell-shaped curve; build to peak then terminal decline.
Simplistically, infrastructure (and ownership) changes along the way are mostly about delaying inevitable cessation and abandonment.
In principle, wind is a forever business and in the ascendancy; oil and gas is not. Nor for that matter is coal.
Hydrocarbon production is in retreat, driven by mounting resource scarcity and the need to stall anthropomorphic climate change.
The UK Continental Shelf, on and offshore, provides a good example of such forces at work. Oil and gas output is well down the decline curve and coal production is close to extinction.
Meanwhile, despite the failure of the latest UK licensing round, offshore Big Wind is roaring ahead, though onshore is messy.
The Tory government’s antipathy to onshore windfarms in England has largely smothered progress for over a decade.
The situation in Scotland is more enlightened; the Holyrood government has encouraged the growth of both off- and onshore wind north of the border while attitudes towards Big Oil are hardening.
Indeed onshore wind is at the threshold of becoming generational thanks to ScottishPower, which is, to quote Energy Voice (13 July), “supercharging” Scotland’s first ever commercial windfarm – Hagshaw Hill in Lanarkshire.
Briefly, the original 26 turbines core at Hagshaw came onstream in 1995 with a collective capability of up to 16MW.
An extension was consented in December 2006 with a further 20 turbines installed and collectively rated 26MW.
Today, the original turbines are being replaced with 14 new turbines collectively rated to 84MW, plus an energy storage facility.
Seven of the new turbines will be erected at the core site; the others plus the energy storage facility are to be installed on an extension south of the existing complex.
Repowering should be complete by early 2025.
ScottishPower expects to learn much from Hagshaw Hill and this to other sites as they too approach the end of their operational lives in their current form.
A spokesperson told Energy Voice: “The decommissioning process at Hagshaw Hill is progressing well with the all of turbines now dismantled and the delivery of the first new turbine components to the site expected in early 2024.
“The towers and non-functioning metal parts have been removed from the site for recycling, with some equipment being reused in the wider industry wherever possible.
“The blades remain in storage whilst we work with partners to identify the best and most productive method for re-use, repurpose and recycling.
“Along with the rest of the wind sector, we’re committed to finding a sustainable solution for turbine blades as recently highlighted in (Scotland’s) Onshore Wind Sector Deal.”
Wind turbines have a lifespan of about 25 years and many thousands of first generation onshore units are in line for the chop worldwide. They present a major recycling challenge, in particular blades.
This is an issue that is only now receiving the attention that governments and Big Wind should have dealt with decades ago; similarly the honest disposal of oil and gas infrastructure including, eventually, the forever plugging of literally millions of abandoned/orphaned production wells, many of them leaking.
So what is Big Wind actually doing about responsible decommissioning of redundant turbines? Solve the blades issue and wind turbines should become close to 100% recyclable.
Locally, an early estimate of the scale of the problem was published two years ago by Zero Waste Scotland.
Key findings included:
- Around 5,500 turbines will be decommissioned in Scotland (based on sites that were either consented, in construction or operational in 2020);
- By 2050 onshore wind decommissioning in Scotland could have generated between 1.25M – 1.4M tonnes of materials
- By weight, the biggest material waste arisings from wind turbine decommissioning will be ferrous metals (steel, iron) which are currently exported for recycling.
- The forecast includes over 60,000 tonnes of fibreglass and 90,000 tonnes of resin + balsa, materials all currently landfilled.
The report talks of numerous business opportunities but our rudimentary supply chain has so far been slow to respond.
Meanwhile, elsewhere, there have been several significant developments on the blade recycling front.
In the United States, with more than 142GW of wind power installed across its landmass as of June this year, the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Wind Energy Technologies Office has launched its Wind Turbine Materials Recycling Prize, a $5.1million competition that is administered by the state-owned, world-renowned National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).
Part of DOE’s American-Made Challenges Program, the prize aims to help the country develop a cost-effective and sustainable recycling industry for two high-impact categories of wind turbine materials: fibre-reinforced composites … the stuff of turbine blades … and rare earth elements.
The intention is to expand ongoing efforts to advance wind turbine materials recycling, such as NREL’s thermoplastic resin research for blades.
The prize also seeks to promote collaboration among wind energy entrepreneurs, inventors, researchers, and experts from DOE’s national laboratories, such as NREL, to accelerate the development and commercialisation of wind turbine materials recycling technologies.
The incentive is huge. The cumulative mass of decommissioned blades in the US alone will reach 1.5 million tonnes by 2040 and 2.2 million by 2050, according to NREL.
One novel solution on the table already grabbing market attention is a cement incorporating processed blade materials.
It was developed in two years flat by the Environmental Solutions and Services division of Veolia North America.
According to its president and chief executive, Bob Cappadona, turning blades into something a customer would want “was the Rubik’s Cube of recycling”.
Another novel solution has been developed by Knoxville, Tennessee–based Carbon Rivers, which now recovers fibreglass from shredded blades via pyrolysis by heating the waste fibreglass-resin composite above 300 °C in the absence of oxygen.
Carbon Rivers says recovered fibreglass can be upcycled into a variety of products such as non-woven fabrics, compounded thermoplastics, injection moulding pellets and 3D printer filaments.
In Europe there are three projects that currently stand out;
- Development of the recyclable blade by Siemens Gamesa which became operational for the first time in 2021;
- Development of a process by Vestas to reverse engineer existing blades, and recover chemical components for re-use;
- Energyloop in Spain where the emphasis will be on used blade recovery for repowering purposes and components.
In the case of Siemens Gamesa’s recyclable blades, these are now being manufactured in Denmark and England, with the first batch installed at RWE’s new Kaskasi windfarm offshore Germany.
However, the new blades are made from a recyclable epoxy resin known as Recyclamine.
Siemens Gamesa says: “Upon decommissioning, the blades will be dismantled and immersed in a heated, mildly acidic solution, allowing the resin to dissolve. The materials can then be recovered and reused to make new plastic products.”
Early this year, Vestas said it had developed a process that renders epoxy-based turbine blades fully recyclable.
© Supplied by CetecCombining newly discovered chemical technology developed within the CETEC (Circular Economy for Thermosets Epoxy Composites) initiative, and partnerships with Olin and Stena Recycling, the solution can be applied to existing blades.
Once matured, Vestas says this will eliminate landfill disposal of epoxy-based blades when they are decommissioned.
Lisa Ekstrand, vice president and head of sustainability at Vestas says: “Once this new technology is implemented at scale, legacy blade material currently sitting in landfill, as well as blade material in active windfarms, can be disassembled, and re-used.
”This signals a new era for the wind industry, and accelerates our journey towards achieving circularity.”
The breakthrough is timely as WindEurope expects around 25,000 tonnes of blades to reach the end of their operational life annually by 2025.
Finally, Energyloop, a company owned by Spain’s FCC Ámbito and Iberdrola for the recycling of wind farm components has signed a collaboration agreement with circular economy specialist Surus to offer a joint solution for the recycling of blades in repowering projects.
Next year, Energyloop will start blade processing from a 10 million euro facility in Cortes, Navarre, northern Spain.
The initial objective is the recovery of wind turbine blade components and their reuse in other sectors such as energy, aerospace, automotive, textile, chemical and construction. Energyloop will also work on the development and use of new recycling technologies.
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