Recycling of end-of-life wind blades through renewable energy driven molten salt pyrolysis process
Disposal of large volume of end-of-life (EOL) wind blades in an environmentally friendly way is becoming a major challenge for the global wind power industry. The project aims at developing a renewable energy driven molten salt pyrolysis process for achieving a cheap, clean and efficient EOL wind blade recycling process. The levelized cost and potential carbon footprint per kg of the EOL wind blade material of new recycling process should be significantly lower than the traditional thermal pyrolysis process. The process will be developed based on a close collaboration between two departments of KTH and Vattenfall.
Background
Wind power is a promising pathway for a future fossil-free society due to its abundant resources and continuously decreasing costs. From 2013 to 2022, the global total installed capacity has grown 3 times from 300 GW to 900 GW. However, wind turbines themselves present an environmental issue when their useful life is over, since they will become a form of hazardous waste. Especially the wind blades, they are mostly made of glass fiber reinforced plastics (GFRP) and can be longer than 60 m. The total annual amount of end-of-life (EOL) wind blade can reach 683 ktons in 2025. In Sweden, the cumulative number of installed wind turbine has reached 813 by 2005. Based on the 20 years’ average life time, there will be more than 2400 pieces of wind blades need to be disposed by 2025. With the rapid growth of installation after 2005, this number will increase dramatically in the future.
Due to the nature of the GFRP materials, wind blades are difficult to re-process and convert into new valuable materials. In addition, due to the large size, it is also costly to transport and cut. Therefore, they are mainly disposed of through landfills and incineration, which could cause serious environmental impacts. Other recycling methods (mechanical, thermal and chemical) also have been explored. However, they are either complicated, energy consumption, high cost or failed to obtain high value end products. So far, industrial scale recycling solutions for GFRP composites are still rare or non-existent in most regions. Recently, at national level, many European countries started to forbid composite waste, including EOL wind blades, from being landfilled. At company level, Vattenfall has committed to landfill ban and to recycle all wind turbine blades by 2030. Therefore, developing cheap, clean and efficient EOL wind blade recycling processes is of great significance.
Aims and objectives
The project aims at developing a renewable energy driven molten salt pyrolysis process for achieving a cheap, clean and efficient EOL wind blade recycling process. The new process can be directly integrated with renewable energy systems (e.g. solar, wind power) without extra electricity storage facilities.
Project partners
-
Royal Institute of Technology (KTH)
-
Vattenfall Vindkraft AB
Funding is provided by Energimyndigheten.
Timeframe: 1 May 2024 – 30 April 2027
Researchers
For further information about this project, please contact Wujun .
Publications
Publications coming out of this project will be available through Diva.