Research project
EoLO-Hubs - Wind turbine blades End of Life through Open HUBs for circular materials in sustainable business models
- Start date: 1 January 2023
- End date: 31 December 2026
- Funder: Horizon Europe (Innovate UK)
- Value: €12 million
- Primary investigator: Dr. Anne Velenturf
- Co-investigators: Dr Colin Mackie, Professor Leon Black, Professor Phil Purnell
- External co-investigators: See project description
EoLO HUBs is a €12.2 million project funding a multi-disciplinary team of 18 organisations across 7 countries - 8 Research Organisations, 4 SMEs, 4 Large Companies, a regional Cluster and a Public authority.
A sustainable Circular Economy in the wind sector is required to solve the End of Life (EoL) problematic of the Wind Turbine Blades (WTB), prioritising environmental factors and fairly sharing the efforts to overcome the technological, economic and social barriers among all the key actors.
To this end, EoLO-HUBs will develop 3 open hubs to co-design, co-create and demonstrate new technologies, organisational structures, business models and legal recommendations to implement circular economy according to the needs of the different European regions.
It will lead to the recycling of almost 90% of wind turbine materials by 2030, creating a circular economy that generates jobs and reduces greenhouse gas emissions.
The Knowledge Hub will connect stakeholders to effectively collaborate on similar initiatives, sharing data and spilling over good practices to replicate success stories during and after the project. The other 2 hubs will build a large-scale demonstration covering the full value chain for WTB, reusing and recycling from the dismantling to the valorisation in heavy composite sectors through efficient waste recycling solutions, while specific needs of EoL composites in wind technology are represented.
The Onshore Hub will include the necessity of implementing a Zero-pollution and mobile system for dismantling onshore technologies without jeopardise the environment and maximising the recovering of paints and coatings as well as enabling the recyclability of chemical building blocks (solvolysis).
The Multi-sectorial and Offshore Hub will include the necessity of adapting current high volume composite recycling technologies (pyrolysis) to obtain a high yield of rGF and cGF in a Zero-waste approach collaborating with other sectors as well as to demonstrate how to prepare the gateways for offshore technologies to connect to the new value chain for recycling WTB.
In this way, EoLO-HUBs will create a long-term collaboration of key actors with access to relevant demonstration scenarios to ensure the recycling of almost 90% of the WTB materials, creating a circular economy that generates jobs and reduce greenhouse gas emission by 2030.
External co-investigators:
- FUNDACION AITIIP
- NCC OPERATIONS LIMITED UK
- ECHT regie in transitie B.V. N
- NORDEX ENERGY GMBH
- MOSES PRODUCTOS SL
- MITSUBISHI CHEMICAL ADVANCED MATERIALS GMBH
- THE MANUFACTURING TECHNOLOGY CENTRE LIMITED UK
- CONSORCIO AERODROMO AEROPUERTO DE TERUEL
- Advantis ApS
- FRAUNHOFER GESELLSCHAFT ZUR FORDERUNG DER ANGEWANDTEN FORSCHUNG EV
- Jansen Recycling Group B.V.
- MONDRAGON GOI ESKOLA POLITEKNIKOA JOSE MARIA ARIZMENDIARRIETA S COOP
- SAINT-GOBAIN PLACO IBERICA SA
- GLOBAL EQUITY & CORPORATE CONSULTING SL
- NEDERLANDSE ORGANISATIE VOOR TOEGEPAST
- NATUURWETENSCHAPPELIJK ONDERZOEK TNO
- CENTRO RICERCHE FIAT SCPA
- POLYMERIS
Read more about Dr Velenturf’s research on their staff profile and energy blogs.