Wind turbine blades are getting a fresh new life thanks to REGEN Fiber's innovative recycling process! Their mechanical process turns old blades into top-notch construction materials. REGEN's can turn any blade into strong, clean fiber that passes all the tests. With wind farms desperate for sustainable solutions, this Iowa-based startup is gearing up to start recycling blades at scale. Their new facilities will give old blades a new purpose in buildings, roads and more as the wind industry upgrades to bigger and better turbines. Out with the old, in with the recycled - REGEN Fiber is spearheading a recycling revolution for the wind sector.



Check out REGEN Fiber



Contact Jeff Woods! jwoods@regenfiber.com



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Allen Hall: I'm Allen Hall and I'm here with my good friend Joel Saxum and on this special edition of the Uptime Wind Energy podcast, we have a really interesting topic. As of 2020, there were over 720,000 tons of blade material around the world that needed to be disposed of or recycled. With more wind farms being built every year, this number will continue to grow.



Landfilling the blades is problematic. Their large size makes transportation and burial difficult and expensive. So finding an effective way to recycle the blades is becoming an urgent priority for the wind industry. Companies and researchers are currently exploring how to design future turbine blades for easier recycling, but wind farm operators need better recycling and disposal options for existing old blades, some promising recycling methods are being developed. And we are speaking with 1 of the companies investing in new recycling methods, REGEN Fiber. Our guest today is Jeff Woods, director of business development at Travero and Travero is the parent company of REGEN Fiber. Jeff, Welcome to the podcast.



Jeff Woods: Thank you.



Allen Hall: Obviously, we know we have a lot of problems with old blades and in the United States. It does create a lot of publicity of pictures, of blades being buried and more recently in Iowa where you are and also down in Texas.



There's been some disposal issues where blades have been sitting out for a long time and haven't been recycled like they were supposed to be. And this is creating quite the clamor for wind turbine OEMs and operators.



Jeff Woods: It is. It's a problem that I think when the industry got rolling



decades ago, there was a lot of passion about getting a renewable energy resource literally up in the air and running to produce electricity in the region here, particularly in the central Midwest, where we've got more wind tunnels and you can shake a stick at quite literally and, for a long period of time, there really wasn't a lot of problems.



Yeah, a few blades were getting damaged through lightning or storms or hail or whatnot. But boy, in the last I'll Five, seven, 10 years as some of these farms have approached, the 20 year mark in particular, which is generally accepted as a benchmark time for the lifespan for some of the original blades that are out there.



They're coming down they're stressed, they've been damaged. They need to be replaced. You've got the inflation reduction act now which is compelling even more ferns to absolutely amp up on steroids. What the future of wind energy production in the United States looks like. So you have a lot of companies that are talking about going in and repowering existing turbines, knocking existing turbines down entirely and replacing them with much bigger much more efficient units.



And that's all great,