Tanya Weaver Mon 17 Feb 2025
Collected at: https://eandt.theiet.org/2025/02/17/chinese-tech-repurposes-retired-wind-turbine-blades-asphalt-building-roads
A Chinese research team has developed technology to repurpose decommissioned wind turbine blades into a material for use in asphalt mixtures and cement concrete.
Wind turbines are designed with a lifespan of 20 to 25 years. This means that after a couple of decades of providing energy, wind turbines on wind farms built in the early 2000s will soon reach retirement age.
According to Chinese news agency Xinhua, a raft of wind farms built in China during this period means that by the end of 2025 the country will have seen a wave of decommissioned wind turbines.
It is not just China. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in the US estimates that between 3,000 and 9,000 turbine blades will be retired each year for the next five years in the US, increasing to between 10,000 and 20,000 until 2040.
Disposing of wind turbines once they have reached the end of their useful lives can be challenging, particularly the blades.
While the shell, nacelle, gearbox and other metallic internal components can be recycled or reused, the blades are more challenging. To ensure they are lightweight and durable they have been made with composite materials including fibreglass, carbon fibre and epoxy resin. This makes them difficult and costly to recycle.
Being such big structures in their own right – an average blade on a typical onshore wind turbine measures around 50 metres in length, with some newer blades being almost double that – poses a significant recycling challenge.
For the past five years, a research team from the Lanzhou Institute of Chemical Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has been working on a solution to this challenge.
Led by Tang Zhicheng, a professor at CAS, the research addresses not only the challenge of decommissioning these massive structures, but also how the composite materials can be recycled and reused as a valuable resource.
The research team looked at what applications the retired blades could be used for considering their unique properties of corrosion resistance and high strength, plus their light weight.
Through a combination of physical crushing and chemical treatment, the team has created the technology to successfully modify the blades for use in asphalt mixtures and cement concrete.
The team demonstrated the application of modified asphalt mixtures incorporating retired turbine blades on a section of the Qingfu Highway in Lanzhou, north-west China’s Gansu Province, in September 2024.
Wang Zhaoli, deputy general manager of the road construction company collaborating on the project, said that the modified asphalt pavement has shown promising results after more than five months of operation, with the road surface exhibiting no cracks, rutting or material detachment. This indicates the feasibility of this recycling approach.
According to the research team, this recycling method is set to undergo more demonstration projects this year. The hope is that it will provide a reliable and scalable solution for recycling decommissioned wind turbine blades.
Tang said that as recycling technologies advance, the large number of decommissioned wind turbine blades could be repurposed into valuable “urban mineral resources”.
He is hopeful that this shift would not only bolster the sustainable development of the renewable energy industry, but also contribute to achieving China’s dual carbon goals of peaking carbon emissions by 2030 and attaining carbon neutrality by 2060.
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