Sustainable designs for Wind Turbine Blades
report
With the recent cost breakthroughs, offshore wind is now established as a crucial pillar of the Dutch energy transition. Developing an affordable, low-carbon energy system in the Netherlands necessitates a large-scale rollout of offshore wind power capacity in the Dutch part of the North Sea – to potentially 35-75 GW by the year 2050. “The Netherlands Long-Term Offshore Wind R&D Agenda” calls for further reductions in LCoE. However, sustainability in offshore wind industry is also needed to be addressed to successfully roll out such a vast amount of offshore wind power capacity. Sustainable design and end of life solution (EoL) of composite wind turbine blades (WTBs) contribute to a circular economy. The state of the art in life cycle assessment (LCA) study is limited. This is due to the limited availability of life cycle inventory data, describing the impacts of materials and methods used in WTB manufacturing and EoL solutions are available mainly on a small scale and limited to co-cement processing and incineration. The innovation idea of this project is to develop new innovative sustainable blade design concepts including materials and modular design which can be more easily separated and recycled. The modular design could help to solve the leading-edge erosion (LEE) challenge on the wind turbine blade.
Topics
TNO Identifier
884593
Publisher
TNO
Collation
47 p.
Place of publication
Petten