Recyclable Wind Turbine Blades have Arrived
- Ned Patton
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
I saw articles this week in two of the industry publications and websites that I frequent – Composites World and JEC – both of which are very good resources to keep up with what is an ever changing and evolving business. The article I saw was about Siemens Gamesa, the wind energy subsidiary of the giant renewable energy company Siemens Energy AG, and a joint announcement that they made with Swancor, a Taiwanese chemicals company that I have written about. What these two companies announced is that they have formed a partnership to produce all of Siemens Gamesa’s new RecyclableBlades for the onshore and offshore installations that are being put into use by RWE Offshore Wind GMBH. Their first large scale European installation will be in the Sofia Offshore Wind Farm about 120 miles off the coast of the UK in the North Sea.
This is the first full scale industrial use of this recyclable resin system in the North Sea which is one of the most challenging environments on the planet. And it is going into what is arguably the biggest looming composites recycling challenge that we face today. I have written about this challenge a number of times, and of course this issue figures highly in my upcoming book, but that is beside the point. This is extremely good news for the wind industry, the industrial side of the composites industry, and the planet itself. The Siemens Gamesa / RWE project is expected to be fully operational sometime in 2026. Apparently most of the foundation work has either been completed or will be completed later this year. The remainder of the onshore work and laying the cabling will take through about the end of next year, and all of the turbine installations will happen in 2026.
These blades are 108 meters long (a bit over 350 feet) so this was no small undertaking. This project is in fact the largest ongoing wind energy construction project in the North Sea, with a total installed capacity to be on the order of 1.4 GW. Each turbine is expected to have a nominal capacity of 14 MW, so there are about 100 of these turbines that will be installed at the Sofia site. The ongoing Vestas installation of the coast of Scotland is second at 1.1 GW, so there is a lot of offshore wind capacity being installed in the North Sea. This is of course because of the sustained winds that are prevalent in the North Sea, as any sailor knows well. And they are as large as they are because of the drive to larger turbines because of the cost/benefit tradeoff of wind installations that I have talked about in this space before. The biggest cost for offshore installations is the platform itself, so the more energy you can produce per platform, the lower the overall cost of the electricity. The fact that prices have also come down on the materials themselves is just an added bonus.
A tremendous amount of materials testing and characterization had to go into this as well as some small scale demonstrations that Siemens and Swancor have been doing over the last several years before this material could be qualified for use on such a large scale offshore wind energy project. Siemens Gamesa and Swancor have been working on this technology for wind turbine blades since about 2021 and they have made tremendous progress in their work to date. Several smaller test installations have been constructed, and they have even done prototyping of the large scale wind turbine blades in their facilities in Europe.
This pic is from a 2022 Taipei Times article about the announcement a couple of years ago of the partnership between Siemens Gamesa and Swancor to develop and implement their RecyclableBlade. I like this pic because it provides a bit of perspective of how large these wind turbine blades really are. The article that this picture comes from talks extensively about the testing and characterization of the material that went into Siemens and Swancor’s ability to make the announcement that they just made about using Swancor’s EzCiclo resin and CleaVER chemistry to enable near 100% recyclability of these wind turbine blades when they are taken out of service about 20 years from now. And since a large portion of the newer, longer wind turbine blades is carbon fiber which has a higher value on the recycled fiber market than the traditional glass fiber used to make wind turbine blades makes this a remarkable achievement.
According to the Taipei Times article, this all started in 2015 when Swancor started work on their recyclable thermosetting epoxy resin system for use in offshore wind energy in Taiwan. From that initial research, and through the rather rapid development of their resin system in 2018 they signed an agreement with Siemens Gamesa to build 20 offshore wind turbines using their recyclable resin system. That project was quite successful and led eventually to their latest announcement.
And I don’t want to leave out of this discussion the largest of the wind turbine manufacturers and their circularity efforts. Vestas and Orsted (Danish wind energy giants) have partnered together to work with Olin and Stena Recycling to implement the process that I have written about previously developed as part of the CETEC project to enable complete recycling of the resins and fibers from current glass and carbon fiber epoxy wind turbine blades. They have taken a different approach than Siemens Gamesa / Swancor in that they are not planning to use a recyclable resin, they are planning to implement a recycling technology for existing glass fiber and carbon fiber epoxy wind turbine blades.
The goal of this effort is to eventually have net-zero wind farms by 2040. The idea is to make their blades 100% recyclable through the use of the partnership with OLIN and Stena Recycling using the CETEC developed process. Orsted is in this to make the towers out of a reduced carbon steel that has been under development for several years and has gone through the rigorous materials qualification tests required to be used for a wind turbine tower. These are all onshore wind turbines, but the installations are in characteristically very windy locations in Northern Europe like Denmark and the Netherlands where winds off the North Sea are consistent enough to make this a worthwhile endeavor. The steady winds are much like what is available in Texas here in the US, which has more installed wind capacity than all other US States combined. I won’t show the pic of the mountain of used wind turbine blades that is still sitting on the ground outside of Sweetwater Texas just because I have shown it too many times already.
That’s about it for this week. As always, I hope everyone that reads these posts enjoys them as much as I enjoy writing them. I will post this first on my website – www.nedpatton.com – and then on LinkedIn. And if anyone wants to provide comments to this, I welcome them with open arms. Comments, criticisms, etc. are all quite welcome. I really do want to engage in a conversation with all of you about composites because we can learn so much from each other as long as we share our own perspectives. And that is especially true of the companies and research institutions that I mention in these posts. The more we communicate the message the better we will be able to effect the changes in the industry that are needed.
My second book, which may be out in the late fall, is a roadmap to a circular and sustainable business model for the industry which I hope that at least at some level the industry will follow. Only time will tell. At least McFarland announced it in their Fall Catalog. And this time it is under a bit different category – Science and Technology. Maybe it will get noticed – as always that is just a crap shoot.
As I have said before, my publisher and my daughter have come to an agreement about the cover. So, I’ve included the approved cover at the end of this post. Let me know whether or not you like the cover. Hopefully people will like it enough and will be interested enough in composites sustainability that they will buy it. And of course I hope that they read it and get engaged. We need all the help we can get.
Last but not least, I still need to plug my first book. “The String and Glue of our World” pretty much covers the watershed in composites, starting with a brief history of composites, then introducing the Periodic Table and why Carbon is such an important and interesting element. The book was published and made available August of 2023 and is available both on Amazon and from McFarland Books – my publisher. However, the best place to get one is to go to my website and buy one. I will send you a signed copy for the same price you would get charged on Amazon for an unsigned one, except that I have to charge for shipping. Anyway, here’s the link to get your signed copy: https://www.nedpatton.com/product-page/the-string-and-glue-of-our-world-signed-copy. And as usual, here are pictures of the covers of both books.
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