Wind power has been growing ferociously, with global installations totaling 117 gigawatts added in 2023. That's 50% more than the previous year, as calculated by the Global Wind Energy Council.
However, this also adds up to a lot of waste, as old turbines and their primarily fiberglass blades reach the end of their useful life. Research posted to ScienceDirect estimates that 43 million tonnes (about 47 million tons) of waste will be created from turbine blades and their life-cycle processes by 2050.
Recycling them has been difficult, but companies like Carbon Rivers have developed fiberglass recycling technologies to handle the waste. Others have reclaimed the discarded blades to give them a new life as benches or picnic tables.
Now, researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have discovered a more sustainable alternative to fiberglass, as Interesting Engineering shared. It's a bio-derived resin that meets the current turbine blade industry standards and is easily recyclable and reusable.
An approximately 30-foot prototype blade has been made out of the material to demonstrate its viability. The resin has been nicknamed PECAN, which stands for PolyEster Covalently Adaptable Network, and the manufacturing process is not dissimilar to how things currently work.
"The PECAN method for developing recyclable wind turbine blades is a critically important step in our efforts to foster a circular economy for energy materials," Johney Green, the NREL's associate laboratory director for Mechanical and Thermal Engineering Sciences, shared in a press release.
As the release details, wind turbine blades last about 20 years before they're mechanically recycled for other uses, such as concrete filler. Although as recently as 2022, the NREL had stated that as many as 78% of decommissioned blades would end up in landfills if policies or recycling tech didn't change.
As we now know, companies like Carbon Rivers have worked on the recycling issue, while other resin-based turbine blade projects have also materialized.
The NREL worked on finding a blade material that could be recycled and reused to support a circular economy, and it landed a win with bio-derivable sugars. Typical turbine blades can be as long as a football field, sometimes three times that, so this nearly 30-foot prototype worked as proof of the process.
"Nine meters is a scale that we were able to demonstrate all of the same manufacturing processes that would be used at the 60-, 80-, 100-meter blade scale," Robynne Murray, the second corresponding author on the project, said in the release.
PECAN is a leap forward for sustainability in the wind industry, at least as far as the blades are concerned. A mild chemical process can break it down completely in just six hours. After that, the components can be reused repeatedly to remake the same product.
This helps support the sustainability of wind power and obviates the need to use landfills for the blades at all, potentially helping to curb the planet-warming gases that build up in such places.
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