How to facilitate the wind industry to become circular

The Circular Wind Hub: How to facilitate the wind industry to become circular

The wind industry has proven its capabilities in accelerating innovations in order to provide economically viable and sustainable energy in large scale. However, the stakeholders of wind industry are highly motivated in increasing the circularity and sustainability of wind farms even further. This is important as the resources of our planet are limited and therefore, we need to apply circular strategies not only at End-of-Life (EoL) stage of wind farms, but already at design phase. The stakeholders across the value chain and member states of European Union were first gathered in 2020 in Moonshot project1 to evaluate together the most important topics to be considered when increasing the circularity and sustainability. This phase 1 provided nine action agendas ((1) circular permit and tender criteria. Knowledge Hub included action agendas: (2) The modular design, (3) Collaboration in design, (4) Responsibility of materials, and (5) Platform for European wide circular collaboration. The Industrial Hub focused on action agendas: (6) Environmental-specific foundation design and multi-use, (7) retaining data for optimal decommissioning and EoL strategies, (8) Refinery and recycling plant(s), as well as (9) Circular clusters of companies around ports), which were further worked on at phase 2: the Circular Wind Hub.