Old fan "huan" new machine: energy storage, cement, bridge, make clean energy more "clean"

"A large number of wind turbines put into operation by old wind farms have entered their 'twilight years', or quietly retired, or hurriedly buried, and the corresponding policy system and disposal technology reserve are still in a state of absence." Speaking of the current status of China's wind power blades after decommissioning, the person in charge of a wind power blade production enterprise is so emotional.

To some extent, that is true. In the tide of new energy, the harmless disposal of fan blades after retirement and the development of industrialization need to speed up. This is not an idle worry, but a forethought.

In China, the total number of scrapped wind power blades in 2018 was about 3,456 tons, and the total number of scrapped blades this year was about 5,424 tons. From the perspective of the service life of wind turbines, by 2025 or so, China will usher in a large wave of wind power blade scrapping tide. By 2030, more than 30,000 typhoon power units in China will be replaced, and by 2035 this number will exceed 90,000 units. Behind this string of data, are new problems that the wind power industry needs to overcome.

So, what are the harmless leaf treatment technologies?

1. What can wind turbines be decommissioned? Engineers have a brilliant idea to turn fan blades into Bridges

According to Kieran Ruane, a civil engineer who is a lecturer at Munster Technological University in Ireland and a member of Re-Wind, a wind power recycling research group, Wind turbine fan blades are mostly made of ultra-strong FRP glass fiber, with an average length of more than 150 feet (45.72 meters) and weight of more than ten tons, which is not easy to be decomposed, and if burned in an incinerator, it will cause air pollution, so most choose to occupy space for burial treatment. In order to turn the recycled wind turbine blades into a part of the infrastructure, nine months of engineering and material testing provided a solution for the design of the bridge.

Marcin Sobczyk, a developer at metal recycling company Anmet, revealed that the company has been developing ways to reuse wind turbine blades for seven years, starting with making wind turbine blades into outdoor furniture, and now hoping to turn fan blades into Bridges in order to expand its business footprint.

Sobczyk said that wind turbine blades have the characteristics of high strength, light, and durability for all-weather operation, although the design life of wind turbines is only 20 to 30 years, but after retirement, the fan blades also have decades of life, so Anmet company enhanced the strength of the recycled fan blades after three years of testing. So that it can be used like other Bridges for more than a century.

The world's first bridge made of wind turbine blades is located on the river in Szprotawa in western Poland, while the second fan blade bridge fell on the old railway in Midlerton and Jol in Ireland.

Bridges made of wind blades are cost-competitive with Bridges made of reinforced concrete, solve the problem of decommissioning wind power, and even reduce CO2 emissions, while also evaluating the condition of old blades in many more standardized ways and reusing fan blades.

2. What to do after the fan blade is scrapped? Don't worry, you can recycle cement

Now, a new environmentally friendly approach has emerged - recycling old fan blades to replace coal, sand and clay as cement fuel and raw materials. This approach also helps to reduce CO2 emissions in the cement industry.

Doesn't that sound like a surprise? GE Renewable Energy recently announced that it has signed an agreement with Veolia, an environmental services company, to recycle wind turbine blades. Under the agreement, Veolia will recycle most of the decommissioned blades while GE upgrades its turbines and renovates old wind farms.

Specifically, when GE upgrades its wind turbines and rebuilds old wind farms, Veolia recyles the removed blades, shredding them at its processing plant and then mixing the ingredients, such as fiberglass and balsa wood, to a cement manufacturing plant to produce Portland cement as an alternative to coal, sand and clay.

In contrast to traditional cement manufacturing processes, Veolia's cement kiln co-disposal technology allows industrial waste to be "transformed" into cement raw materials. On average, about 90% of the blades by weight will be recycled as raw materials for cement production, more than 65% by weight will replace raw materials originally added to the kiln to make cement, and about 28% by weight will replace coal to provide energy for chemical reactions occurring in the kiln.

The journey of a blade from the fan tower to the cement plant has several steps. First, in the process of retrofitting old wind farms, engineers replace old blades that may have been rotating for up to 20 years with longer, lighter and more efficient blades. The newly upgraded blades can help the wind turbines generate more energy each year, ultimately providing customers with more renewable energy.

The retired blades are about 120 feet long from root to tip, about the same length as a wing on the Airbus A380, currently the world's largest passenger jet. Workers would use a crane to break it into three sections and load it onto a truck, which would then drag it to a shredder, where powerful shredders would cut the large blades into smaller pieces.