TY - RPRT
TI - Sustainable Decommissioning: Wind Turbine Blade Recycling 
AU - Bennet, L
AB - Thirty years ago, it would have been hard to imagine that offshore wind could power every home in the UK. Today, that target is one of the key pillars of the UK Government’s climate change policy. This vision has been driven by the passion of wind industry pioneers to forge this new sector and make renewable energy a commercial reality. With this has come an unrelenting drive to develop high-performance, next-generation wind turbines that will achieve the necessary energy capture and cost efficiency. For the blades, composite layers of stiff carbon or glass fibres in a resin matrix were found to be the optimal material, delivering exceptional strength, stiffness-to-density and flexibility in processing.  As the wind industry has grown, it has become a major user of these materials, which have long been a solution to design challenges in the oil and gas, aerospace, automotive, defence and leisure industries. They are found in the pipe systems at oil and gas rigs, in car seats and interiors, aeroplane wings, bicycles, skis and surfboards, to name but a few applications. Composite blades are now the final hurdle towards fully recyclable wind turbines (85-90% of a turbine is technically recyclable already1). At the end of their lives, they have proven difficult and costly to reclaim and reprocess. To fully satisfy the sector’s future growth plans and sustainability goals, finding the right solution for recycling them is becoming imperative, especially as the first generation of wind farms are starting to reach the end of their 25-year lifecycles. In the year of COP26, this is the moment for the wind and other industries to pause and take stock. Pooling our collective experience and resources, we can achieve the feats of engineering that will make the energy transition and pan-sector circular economy a reality. This report is the result of one such cross-sector collaboration between OGTC, Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE) Catapult, University of Leeds and National Composites Centre (NCC). It is the first phase in our work to identify, study and then demonstrate scalable, cost-effective, and sustainable composite recycling technologies that will be applicable to the wind industry
DA - 2021/03//
PY - 2021
SP - 74
PB - ORE Catapult
UR - https://ore.catapult.org.uk/?industryreports=energy-transition-alliance-blade-recycling-report-full-version
LA - English
KW - Wind Energy
KW - Human Dimensions
KW - Climate Change
ER -