Ever wonder what happens to those wind turbine blades when they reach the end of their roughly twenty-five year life span?
Here is what has gone on.
Now there are other options coming online to deal with the lack of recycling.
- Voodin Blade Technology has created the largest wooden turbine blades which offer a great alternative to the fiberglass and epoxy resin blades.
- There are ways to grind up the fiberglass and epoxy resin blades and use them in cement and road construction.
- Vestas Wind Systems has found a chemical process to break down the epoxy resin in the blades so the fiberglass and resin can be separated and reused in new blades.
- Siemens Gamesa has come up with a blade made with a new resin that will allow the different components of the blades to be broken down and recycled.
The wooden blade option has a lot of benefits over the fiberglass blades.
- Stored carbon in the wood.
- Less energy to produce the product.
- Up to a seventy-eight percent reduction in CO2 emissions.
- Twenty percent reduction in costs.
The technology is just gearing up so as of yet the wooden blades are not reaching the one hundred ninety-five feet to two hundred sixty feet blade length that is standard in the industry. The prototype is sixty-three feet long but by next year they hope to install a wooden wind turbine with one hundred sixty-four foot wooden blades.
At the same time as wooden blades are being considered for use on wind turbines, wooden towers are being considered. Modvion, a Swedesh company, built a ninety-seven foot prototype tower out of wood as well as a three hundred forty-five foot tower. Eventually they hope to build six-hundred- fifty-foot-tall towers to accommodate three-hundred-twenty-five-foot blades.
Wooden towers have benefits over conventional steel towers.
- They can radically reduce the CO2 emissions in manufacturing.
- They can reduce the energy use in manufacturing.
- They store carbon (in the wood) in the tower.
- Being in smaller sections they are more easily transported to the construction site than a three-hundred-forty-foot-tall steel tower.
- For the same reason as above they can be constructed on sites with more limited access.
There are twenty thousand new turbines installed a year! It will take time to gear up to supply the market with wooden turbines. In 2027 a facility will start producing one hundred wooden turbines a year. The goal is to have two thousand wooden turbines built a year in ten years. Like with many situations, this is a partial solution to the problems of intensive energy required in production and lack of recyclability of wind turbines.
How do you feel about wooden wind turbines?
Information for this blog was taken from the following six articles:
