Objective
Wind power plays a crucial role in Europe’s strategy towards a zero-carbon, clean energy-powered economy. While efforts have primarily focused on the development of wind turbine technology, it starts to become evident that the planning associated with the end-of-service life of these installations has been vastly neglected. Wind turbine blades are a particularly challenging component due to their composition and sheer size, which causes uncertainty about how to get rid of them in an environmentally and economically sustainable manner.
Frandsen Industri (FI) will tackle this problem through prototyping and testing a mobile separation platform, which shred and separate the blades directly on the wind farms, and have its functionalities and performance documented and validated. This mobile separation platform will meet the need of the wind farm owners and the wind farm manufacturers by solving the existing problems related to decommissioning wind turbine blades, as it will:
• Reduce the transportation costs by 16x
• Reduce the CO2-emissions by 16x
• Enable the wind farm owners to recover the scrap value of €50/ton of their expired blades.
As up to 250,000 tons of expired wind turbine blades are to be decommissioned per year in our targeted markets in the 2020-2030 period, the business opportunity amounts to €29M/year. The total CO2-emissions for transporting EOSLWTs blades per year using the current method is 1,540,000 kg. Using our mobile separation platform, the CO2-emissions for transporting EOSLWTs blades will be reduced by a factor of 16x, to 96,250 kg per year.
We at FI want to continue our award-winning technological development of solutions within the sphere of decommissioning expired raw materials. The EcoBlade project is a vital part in this, as it allows us to strive for a leadership position in the future market of blade disposal, expecting a cumulated profit of over €10 million in year 5 post project.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
- H2020-EU.3.3. - SOCIETAL CHALLENGES - Secure, clean and efficient energy Main Programme
- H2020-EU.2.1.1. - INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies - Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)
- H2020-EU.2.3.1. - Mainstreaming SME support, especially through a dedicated instrument
Funding Scheme
SME-2 - SME instrument phase 2Coordinator
9500 HOBRO
Denmark
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.