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Enel Green Power has announced a partnership with Swiss-based storage company Energy Vault with the aim of recycling its decommissioned wind turbine blades.
The recycled blades will by used by Energy Vault as weights in its innovative gravitational energy storage system.
Wind power – and the number of clean energy-producing wind power plants – has increased new capacity by a record 53% in 2020 and is set to continue its exponential growth in the coming years. This is very good news on the renewables front but also brings with it a series of considerations that cannot be ignored: in particular, the need to identify circular solutions for when these plants are dismantled at the end of their life cycles.
This necessity, together with the important goals of decarbonization and reaching net-zero emissions by 2050, is increasingly leading us towards the use of sustainable technologies for storing the energy necessary to make up for the wind’s inevitable intermittency. Wind power and energy storage have been brought together with the recent partnership agreement signed between Enel Green Power and Energy Vault, a Swiss technology company that specializes in gravitational energy storage systems.
This partnership aims to integrate the gravity energy storage technology with the recycling of materials no longer needed at wind plants, applying a circular economy perspective across the entire wind power value chain. But let’s start at the beginning.
