Posters

Abstract

In June last year, WindEurope called for a Europe-wide landfill ban on decommissioned wind turbine blades by 2025[1].Fulfill this goal leads wind turbine-owning companies that are near to end of life (EoL) to ask itself how to deal with this big issue. Currently, companies, research centers and universities have increased their efforts in research of repowering, reuse and recycling solutions for these EoL wind turbines. But, how big is this problem? How can we design a recycling process for a region if we do not know how many wind turbines are near to their EoL? Where are these turbines? How many tons of material must be recycled? And, how many tons of each type of material? With all these questions without easy answer, how can a recycler company approach an economically feasible recycling process? These questions were addressed in REPAL project by the Spanish consortium formed by IBERDROLA, FCC AMBITO and SIEMENS GAMESA, together with TECNALIA. One of the most interesting result from this project was the development of a tool that answers all the previous questions with quantitative data. This tool is the result of an extensive analysis that crosses information between different databases, bibliography and the wide knowledge about wind sector and composite materials of the 4 companies involved. The tool is dynamic and able to do programed calculation from different search parameters, returning the results in table and graph formats [1] WindEurope–Cefic–EuCIA. Accelerating Wind Turbine Blade Circularity. White Paper. May 2020. Available online:https://windeurope.org/wp-content/uploads/files/about-wind/reports/WindEurope-Accelerating-wind-turbine-blade-circularity.pdf