Veolia has partnered with GE on wind turbine blade recycling, which hopefully means big things for the environment. Amazon committed to buy 250MW of renewable wind power from Orsted, Wood Mackenzie predicts market share 10 years from now on the big three turbine manufacturers - are predictions like this even...useful? And, Timken is investing $75MM in the wind energy market - is this a big deal and a boon for the reliability of turbine bearings?



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Transcript EP39 - Veolia Wind Turbine Blade Recycling, Timken, Amazon and 10-Year Predictions



welcome back i'm Allen Hall i'm Dan Blewett and this is the uptime podcast where we talk about wind energy engineering lightning protection and ways to keep your wind turbines running all right welcome back to the uptime podcast i'm your co-host Dan Blewett and on today's show we've got a bunch of great topics number one uh GE choosing Veolia wind turbine blade recycling - it's actually a really interesting story about the way they intend to use that in cement mix an interesting article uh by the consulting firm would mackenzie predicting siemens gonna go mesa renewable energy vestas and ge and how they'll increase their market share over the next decade uh interesting article about amazon committing to buy uh 250 megawatts of power from orsted in europe and then our tech segment we'll talk a little bit about timken and their uh commitment to invest 75 million to increase their uh capacity and wind energy and lastly we'll talk a little bit about green ammonia and vestus backing a wind plant to do that so al let's start with uh ge and veolia so obviously we've talked before about wind turbine blade recycling being a big problem because these things are enormous and there's no good way to put a good place to put them and they don't really just like mold well into the environment i mean we're just burying them at the moment and trying to find places to put them so uh tell us about this article about violia and their agreement of how to process these so ge has been working for the last couple of years on how to recycle the blades because some of those blades are starting to come out of service and they've they've been looking at recycling for a while but obviously it's you know where do you recycle it where is it going to go where are you going to put it back into the ecosystem and it it looks like they found a home in the cement industry and the article is interesting uh because it was addressing sort of two different pieces to the cement uh when you manufacture cement it kind of goes to a killing process so they're using the the first of all they grind up the blades which is a it's a massive problem because when anything that's made out of epoxy and fiberglass is inherently tough and to grind that into usable chunks or pieces is not easy so it's like putting it through a gigantic paper shredder but on the on the world's most largest paper shredder industrial scale paper shredder it's got to sit there and just kind of chew at it uh if you ever try to cut yeah you ever try to cut uh fiberglass uh with like a a grinder or something it's just it gets hot and it melts and it gets gooey so you can't there's only certain ways to attack that problem so grinding it up first the big problem but once you get it ground up now you have all this fiberglass which is a great additive to any sort of cement mix because it actually prevents the cement from cracking and coming apart because you got this these fiber binders that hold it together so you have this engineered cement system which is really useful but the second part was they must be burning off the epoxy and epoxy does burn so in that kiln process it sounds like they're reducing the amount of coal used to heat these kil...