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Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
The growing trend of renewable energy, while helping decentralise and diversify the current energetic matrix, may also bring opportunities for improvement. Until today, a vital part of the wind turbine does not have a solidified disposal method in its afterlife. To better assess this issue, one needs to quantify it. A model based on actual wind turbine data enabled high accuracy estimation of the existing waste and predicted what will be generated in the industry's future.
Between 2000 and 2014, the wind was the type of energy that registered the most considerable growth – not just among the renewable, but overall (15% more than second-placed gas) [1]. In the current European Union's plan to achieve net-zero emissions in its energy system by 2050, wind energy will play a relevant role: it expects a continuously grow in installed capacity of 17% until 2025, followed by a 12% one by 2030 [2]. However, what environmental impact can this measure and similar ones induce?
Most wind turbine composition is from recyclable materials (94%); the issue lies in the remainder: the blades, mostly made of composites and resins – challenging to recycle materials [3].
One must take a step back and analyse some data to understand better how much of a concern it can become in the following years. In this paper, one analysed 357 distinct accurate wind turbine blade models from different manufacturers with rated power from 65 kW to 14 MW to attain enough data to create a model to predict the future waste generated by decommissioned wind turbine blades. The primary source of technical information was obtained through a wind turbine model database [4].
As a result, one developed a model to predict with a high resolution – compared to similar works from several authors – what the future holds regarding wind turbine blade waste.
Instead of plotting all the data points in a scatter graph and using the resulting trendline to calculate an equation based on linear regression, the rated power range was divided into 10 intervals to offer a better resolution, Figure 1.
One used a data set published by Wind Europe [5] as an exercise in the practical use of this model. In it, we have the total output of offshore wind turbines installed in Europe between 1995 and 2022. By applying the median (to filter outliers in the data) results seen on each rated power interval in Figure 2 to the number of installed turbines in the respective bin. One estimates the result of 27 years of wind turbine operations: 333.936,15 tons of waste with no current solution besides landfilling or incineration.
Description
Keywords
Wind turbine blade Waste Model
Citation
Lisboa, Lucas; Ribeiro, Luis Frölén (2022). Wind turbine blade waste: a quantifying model. In CIEEMAT 2022 - VII Ibero-American Congress on Entrepreneurship, Energy, Environment and Technology