Organizers and attendees lessons learned and outlook from November 2022 conference at DTU Risø in Denmark.  

International Conference on Sustainable Wind Turbine Blades 2022. Photo Credit: ?? Industrial DTU

The International Conference on Sustainable Wind Turbine Blades: New Materials, Recycling and Future Perspectives was held Nov. 21-23, 2022 at DTU Risø (Roskilde, Denmark). Chaired by Dr. Leon Mishnaevsky, Jr. and Justine Beauson, the event hosted 120 participants including specialists from industry leaders Vestas, Siemens Gamesa, LM Wind Power, Arkema, Owens Corning, Aditya Birla Group and also from research centers such as DTU Wind and Energy Systems, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Fraunhofer IFAM and ORE Catapult. These organizations shared their experience, results and goals for improving sustainability in wind turbine blades. Mishnaevsky is senior researcher at DTU Wind, and coordinator of projects “Durable leading edges for high tip speed wind turbine blades” and “Maintenance and repair strategies for wind energy development.” Beauson is co-leading the international research network, the International Energy Agency (IEA) Wind Task 45 on the topic of wind turbine blade recycling.

In a LinkedIn post, Mishnaevsky listed his first impressions:

According to Beauson, due to many ongoing research projects dedicated to the recycling of wind turbine blades, it is very important to ensure the information exchange between different project teams, in order not to repeat work already demonstrated elsewhere. Beauson observed that the strength of this conference was the representation of all main research projects occurring globally, as well as key stakeholders. 

The conference included a number of presentation from participants involved in projects related to the end-of-life (EOL) of wind turbine blades, such as DecomBlades, SusWind, Rekovind, Zebra, Cetec, Ecoxy, Blades2Build, ReWind and EcoBulk. The participation of industries, universities and public authorities was also key to fruitful discussions, where all opinions were represented. Another important aspect of this conference, Beauson notes, was the multidisciplinary approach — the conference hosted presentations on recycling technologies with technical discussions, but also addressed the value chain perspective, the economic dimension of blade recycling, as well as the social and environmental impacts.

Attendee Nina Vielen-Kallio also gave her impressions of the conference. Vielen-Kallio is a project manager at ECHT (Utrecht, Netherlands), an agency aimed at accelerating the energy transition, and the startup accelerator VentureLab North (Groningen, Netherlands), as well as the founder of the digital platform eWEning star, also seeking to accelerate the energy transition by increasing the efficiency of information discovery in the renewable energy sector.

Read: Moving toward next-generation wind blade recycling

“The conference was mind blowing,” Vielen-Kallio says, “featuring 43 presentations about sustainability, circularity of wind turbine blades in 2.5 days!” Her high-level takeaways included:

Learn more about the conference here.

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