In Denmark wind power provides nearly half
the country's energy needs.
It's a world leader in research and development in the field.
And I've come here to visit two of the industry's global giants
to see how they're tackling a growing problem presented
by the massive blades used in their wind turbines.
Wow, Jonas, these are incredible.
They're enormous.
Yes, for sure.
81 metres of wind turbine blade ready to make
green electricity.
The problem I'm interested in arises
when the turbines stop making green electricity,
at the end of what's typically a 25-year lifespan.
About 85 per cent of wind turbine's mass
can be recycled effectively.
But the blades cannot.
That's because they're made largely from a composite
of epoxy resin and glass, or carbon fibre,
that's incredibly difficult to break down,
which is why most turbine blades end up like these ones
in the United States, in landfills.
Now, though, we're starting to see a change in philosophy.
Durability and long lifetime was the guiding principles.
Now the products have matured, and now we
start to integrate, you could say, other requirements,
including recyclability.
Last year, Siemens Gamesa launched
what it's calling the world's first recyclable offshore wind
turbine blade.
The key innovation?
A new epoxy resin that can be separated easily
from the other components that make up the blade.
Harald Stecher is showing me the fibreglass mats
from a blade tip that's undergone the separation
process.
You can see that these glass mats,
they are actually of good quality.
Even the stitching is still intact.
So you can collect these glass reinforcements
and then use it for automotive industry or for boat building.
The actual process is also more eco-friendly.
The recycling process itself is using acetic acid.
So it's like strong vinegar and 80 degrees Celsius.
And that's also the strength of this recycling process.
So it is not built on nasty chemicals and not very high
temperature.
And it's easily accessible all around the world.
The German-Spanish manufacturer says
the blades do cost more than standard ones,
but are not excessively expensive.
After years of falling prices, on average globally,
wind turbine prices have been rising recently, thanks largely
to supply chain problems and increasing freight and material
costs.
So it may not be the perfect time
to be selling recyclability at a premium.
But the company has reached agreements
to supply the blades to three major clients.
Before I go, I ask Jonas about the price issue.
Why is any customer going to pay more?
The bill for handling your blade's end of life
is unknown today.
So we will expect legislation around waste
handling to increase.
And thereby it's also some sort of economic insurance
that you buy with the recyclable blades.
Some European countries have already
placed bans on putting blades into landfill.
It can be assumed more will follow.
My next stop is with Danish company Vestas.
Hi, Lisa.
Hi.
Here, they're tackling the sustainability issue
from two different angles.
We are working on supporting the development of new recycling
technologies, for example, coat processing in cement kilns,
but also through other technologies.
And actually, today in the US, we
have already recycled 280 blades.
Recycling means the blades' components
can be used for other purposes.
But the company is also looking to develop a circular solution.
With circularity we're using the same materials
that we use when we produce the first blade
and then bring it back into a new blade,
thereby creating a circular loop.
So that is essentially zero waste, then, the circularity.
That is essentially zero waste.
That's the ambition, yes.
It's not an easy goal.
And as with Siemens Gamesa, finding a new resin is key.
Approximately half the mass of a turbine blade
is made up of resin.
The bond it creates with other materials
has to be extremely strong, which
is also what makes it so hard to deconstruct.
We want to design a resin that we can actually use again
and again without losing the very important physical
and chemical properties that you have, because this...
such a blade is going to see very harsh conditions.
To advance the development of a new epoxy resin,
Vestas has joined CETEC, a coalition
of industrial partners and independent Danish scientists.
Nice to meet you.
Welcome.
Nice to meet you.
Thank you.
It's a big project, but you have to start small.
So we start our experiments here in the lab
with these small test samples, which
is exactly the same material that
goes into the turbine blade.
You can say that the turbine blade
is one big molecule, in fact.
And we need to find a way to recycle that
in order to make wind turbine blades fully circular.
In this small-scale test filmed across four days,
the tube on the right of screen shows a new thermostat plastic
developed by CETEC eventually breaking down in acidic acid,
demonstrating that deconstructing these new blades
can work, in theory.
So this is a proof of concept.
How can you be certain in 25 years it'll work?
Well, based on our proof of concept
and the science when I look into it, I can see that it works.
We can actually do this.
What is next for us and what we are doing in this process
is then scaling this into industrial scale.
This is why we need the industrial partners, of course,
but also in terms of having a process that makes sense
in the end in terms of being something
that we can apply industrially.
The coalition will run till 2024 and is
aiming to get as close as possible to an industrially
viable solution before this date.
As for Siemens Gamesa's recyclable blades,
while they are now available, of course
they won't make any difference until those blades
are decommissioned in a quarter century or so.
In the meantime, around the world,
thousands of wind turbines are now
approaching the end of their lifetimes.
More than 6,500 blades will be removed each year in Europe
until 2025, with about 1,400 removed in the US
over the same period.
That's a lot of blades.
So it may be some time before scenes
like this are a thing of the past.