Life cycle assessment of the use of decommissioned wind blades in second life applications

Responsible sourcing for energy transitions: Discussing academic narratives of responsible sourcing through the lens of natural resources justice

“…Renewable energy is only marginally addressed in cluster one. Only a few publications discussed the social and environmental impacts of energy transitions (Kramarz et al, 2021;Watari et al, 2021), the carbon and water footprint of wind energy supply chains (Lundie et al, 2019), or potential ways to enhance the reuse of wind turbine blades through green public procurement (Nagle et al, 2022). Otherwise, cluster two on biomass is more prominent in this respect.…”

“…This proposal establishes a link to cluster nine in which collaboration between procurers and suppliers is pivotal to improving the circular economy and ensuring economic benefits for both parties. Green public procurement is considered an important instrument to govern the demand for EoL wind turbine blades while also creating jobs in high unemployment areas (Nagle et al, 2022). They investigate different repurposing concepts regarding their environmental impacts to determine the best reuse scenarios, potentially diverting 20% of Ireland's blade waste to alternative EoL solutions.…”

Reconstruction of Wind Turbine Blade Geometry and Shape Matching of Airfoil Profiles to Point Clouds

“…Again, there are many emerging methods regarding segmentation. (Nguyen and Le, 2013) To achieve a dimensional reduction of the segmentation problem, our method leverages product knowledge specific to airfoils within the context of turbine blade manufacturing. We adopt a hybrid (graph and geometry based) shape retrieval method as the internal feature around which our sections are searched for (blade axis) is not a physical entity that can be captured.…”

“…(Deeney et al, 2021) Considering the expected volume of cumulative blade waste is projected to reach 43 million tons, (Liu and Barlow, 2017) adaptive reuse offers an efficient alternative by prolonging the life-cycle of turbine blades. (Nagle et al, 2022) The Re-Wind project focuses on developing adaptive re-use ideas for the de-commissioned wind blades. Adaptive re-use ideas such as high voltage electrical power structures (Alshannaq et al, 2019) pedestrian bridges (Leahy et al, 2021) and housing (Bank et al, 2018) (Gentry et al, 2020) have been proposed by the Re-Wind team.…”

Circular supply chain management within the wind energy industry – conceptional ideas towards more circularity

“…None of these publications presents an overview of the CSCM for the wind energy industry in general or in Germany. Instead, for instance, a strategic roadmap within the composites supply chain (Koumoulos et al 2019), an exploratory study on closing the supply chain of critical materials (Lapko et al 2019) and the second use of wind blades (Nagle et al 2022) have been investigated.…”