Continuum is planning to build six wind turbine blade recycling centers across Europe. In the US, several companies are competing to recycle blades into construction materials. With recycling a viable option for blades made of standard epoxy resins, are new recyclable resins worth the effort? Joel, Rosemary and Allen discuss the options for blade recycling and the low-carbon options for future blades.



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Bonus 149



Allen Hall: All right, so this is the bonus episode of the Uptime podcast. Lucky you. Because Rosemary is talking about blade recycling, and there's a lot of new blade recycling initiatives around the world, and particularly in Europe where six blade recycling factors would be built between now and 2030 Now, there's a a lot of questions about what the right approach is, which is the lowest carbon dioxide method to, to recycle blades. Should we bury them? Should we not bury them? Should we turn 'em into furniture? This is a really good bonus episode.



Allen Hall: Well worth listening cause there's a, a lot of good viewpoints about this. I'm Allen Hall, president of Weather Guard Lightning Tech, and I'm here with my good friend from Wind Power Lab, Joel Saxon, and the soon to be guest host of The Fully Charged Live Event in Australia, Rosemary Barnes. And this is the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.



Allen Hall: Well, Rosemary, Denmark base continuum is planning to build six large scale wind turbine blade recycling facilities all across Europe. The first factory is scheduled to be built in southwest Denmark. Of course, why we're built anywhere else and. It's gonna be an operation at the end of 2024, end of next year.



Allen Hall: The second factory is planned for the uk. It's gonna be all six factories they think are be done by 2030. Right. So they're actually gonna meet a 2030 goal. Each factory can process a minimum of 36,000 tons of blades a year. That's a lot of blades. And they're gonna turn this into construction material.



Allen Hall: It doesn't sound like they're gonna burn it. It sounds like they're gonna chop it up and add it to concrete or other. Construction related materials to reinforce them, make 'em better. You got fiber in there, right? So that makes sense. You could chop it up and reinforce different things. Question is with GE slash LM working on recyclable blade resins.



Allen Hall: Same thing for Siemens Mesa. They've got this super break DOWNABLE resin for these recycle blade projects. Does this all make sense if you're, if I'm gonna build a factory to recycle blades and they're gonna make blades recyclable in a different way, coming up like now there seems like there's a mix of technology and factories going in the wrong direction.



Allen Hall: Which one is the right path? 



Rosemary Barnes: Well, I think the eventual right path is to have blades that are really easily recyclable, but in the meantime, the, you know, we haven't got recyclable blades yet, and when we do, it'll be another 20 to 30, or we need to recycle the bulk of those blades. So, yes. Yeah. In the meantime, we need a way to recycle all the blades that already exist, and so this would.



Rosemary Barnes: be that method. But I haven't seen too many details of it cuz already, I mean, there's already ways to recycle blades depending on what your definition of recycling is.