Blade Circularity

Brande / 16 January 2025

The DecomBlades innovation project recently announced new results that prove glass fibre retrieved from wind turbine blades can be processed and melted to high-quality fibre qualifying to be used in new wind turbine blades. As partner in this project, Siemens Gamesa, has received 40 tons of this high-performing fibre and is now re-using it to produce new 115-meter-long turbine blades for Ørsted’s Greater Changhua 2b and 4 project.

Today, the turbines of the wind industry’s early days are reaching their end of life. Some are life extended while others will be decommissioned during the next years. The wind energy industry is committed to finding sustainable ways to dispose of the material from these decommissioned wind turbines, and especially composite materials as in the wind turbine blades remain a challenge.

Enter DecomBlades, a project where industry partners and research institutes joined forces to “establish functional, sustainable value chains to handle end of life wind turbine blades from decommissioning, to re-processing and recycling in new applications,” and provide the basis for commercializing the recycling of wind turbine blades for sustainable impact.

As part of our general commitment and our sustainability vision, Siemens Gamesa joined the DecomBlades project in 2021 together with other partners from the industry. In October 2023, the project could announce that it had succeeded in retrieving fibers from old wind turbine blades in a cleanliness, where they could be processed into new high-performing fibers.

The fact that the project has now succeeded in extracting and processing glass fibres to such a high quality that the material can be melted and used in the production of new wind turbine blades, is a major breakthrough on the path to a circular wind industry. According to Energy Cluster Denmark’s website, “we have achieved this important milestone not at laboratory scale, but at an industrial level and the process has real commercial prospects.”

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It’s incredibly exciting to have reached this point.

“Blade recyclability has in many ways been a Gordian Knot in the past, but we have really made good strides in untying this knot. With our RecyclableBlade we have brought a technology to market that ensures easy separation of the materials. Now, we are proving that the glass fibers can be turned into new and even better glass fibers. And remember, glass is typically more than 50% of a blade mass,” says Jonas Pagh Jensen, Head of Sustainability Value Chain Engagement, Siemens Gamesa.

From proof of concept to proven value chain

Circularity consists of many aspects - minimizing material usage, extending usage and ensuring closed material loops. A circular economy is further based on products that uses recycled content to create its products as well as are recyclable, so that the materials can be used as recycled content in new use cases after a (hopefully) long lifetime.

“We want to be a technology enabler for a sustainable energy transition, so we simply needed to drive this project full-circle. We ran an extensive quality control process of the rovings, had them made into specified fabrics needed for our 115-meter long offshore blades and used them to produce new blades. It is so satisfying to see these fibers come full circle,” says David Vindel Romero, Senior Sustainability Specialist, Siemens Gamesa.

“This innovation demonstrates that full blade circularity is within reach, marking a significant step towards the industry ending blade landfilling and reducing reliance on virgin materials. Our next step is to explore if and how we can scale this innovation from a pilot project to a more proven and cost-efficient value chain solution. Sustainably recycling wind turbine blades requires strong, cross-value-chain collaboration, and we’re proud to be tackling this challenge with Siemens Gamesa and our DecomBlades partners and look forward to installation at Greater Changhua 2b & 4 Offshore Wind Farm in Taiwan.” says Ida Krabek, Head of Global Sustainability, Ørsted.

“There is no doubt that the excellent work done in DecomBlades by all the partners paved the wave for this,” says Jonas Pagh Jensen and is supplemented by Ørsted’s Senior Circularity Advisor, Johan Schoonhoven: “we now need to work on making this not only a one off, but a proven value chain.”

A big step towards full circularity

People Engagement Communications Manager

Irene Bach Velling Villadsen