DNV, a risk management and assurance company, is collaborating with Reodor Studios to create a digital service that will make it easy to plan for sustainable decommissioning and recycling when a wind farm has reached the end of its life cycle.
In the 1970s, the wind power industry boomed, and thousands of wind farms were built around the world. Now, 50 years later, the world faces a historic challenge: what do you do with a 300-ton wind turbine when it has reached the end of its life? ReWind, a brand-new digital service, aims to address this key issue for the wind industry.
DNV’s specialist team analyzes and develops reports for wind farm owners and operators, showing, among other things, which materials the wind turbines contain, how they can be disposed of in the best possible way, what can be recycled and how. Now, in collaboration with Reodor Studios, a Norwegian corporate venture and innovation studio, DNV will shape this into a digital service.
“This service will enable wind farm owners to quickly assess turbine recyclability percentage and options, end-of-life planning, and sustainable decommissioning,” explains Matthew Geraghty, founder and ReWind venture lead at DNV.
“This is the first time in history that we have faced such a challenge,” says Lucy Craig, Director Growth, Innovation & Digitalization, Energy Systems at DNV. “A wind turbine has a life cycle of around 20-30 years, and now many wind turbines are approaching the end of their life cycle. Today, the process of recycling and decommissioning these is extremely complicated and manual, and large quantities of wind turbines end up in landfills, for lack of better solutions. Introducing this digital service helps the owner plan for decommissioning, map costs, and assess recycling options.”
In order to create a digital service that meets all its customers’ needs, DNV has initiated a collaboration with Reodor Studios. By combining Reodor’s expertise in building digital products and services with DNV’s domain knowledge, the ReWind team can work faster, increase the chances of scaling successfully, and build a well-tested service that can make the process of decommissioning wind turbines smoother for wind farm owners and operators.
“Capital Dynamics Clean Energy is committed to responsible investment and ESG implementation throughout the investment lifecycle,” states Gintare Briola, head of portfolio management of CEI at Capital Dynamics. “ReWind’s recyclability study for our wind farms helped us gain a better understanding on the recyclability of the equipment, the existing and developing recycling methods, including for composite blade waste, and forecasted decommissioning costs. ReWind also provided recommendations for various stages of the project life cycle that we at Capital Dynamics hope to implement to minimize environmental impact and reduce lifetime emissions.”
“DNV, which already has a large customer base of wind power operators and owners and sits on world-leading knowledge of wind power, has foreseen the need for this service, both through dialogue with the customers, but also through hard data,” says Kate Butchart, strategic advisor at Reodor Studios. “Add to that Reodor’s creativity and experience in building products and services, and I believe it’s a perfect match to create a solution that can potentially solve a huge industry – and global – need.”
The digitization project is now ongoing, with the team working on validating market needs, developing a service concept, business model, and a scalable growth strategy based on customer insights.
