This wind farm is retiring, so what happens to its tonnes of steel?

Thousands of tonnes of wind farm waste will be trucked out from farmland as the first commercial Australian wind farm to approach the end of life declares its closure date, adding to the millions of old solar panels being disposed of each year.

Pacific Blue, owner of Codrington Wind Farm on the western Victorian coast, announced this week it would pack up its clifftop project near Portland when its 14 turbines reach the end of their technical life in 2027.

Australia’s oldest commercial wind farm is due to shut down in 2027.Credit: Jason South

Opened in 2001, Codrington was Australia’s first commercial wind farm. Its turbines – which have a blade tip height of 81 metres – are a fraction of the size of modern-day turbines, making it a test case for the recycling and repurposing of materials from decommissioned wind farms.

While relatively small, the wind farm generates power for 10,000 homes and saves about 49,000 tonnes of greenhouse emissions a year.

The Clean Energy Council estimated in 2023 that 15,000 tonnes of blade composite waste will have been created in Australia by 2034 from decommissioned wind farms, with no clear path to recycling the materials used in the second-largest contributor to Australia’s clean energy transition.

Pacific Blue declined an interview with this masthead but said in a statement it would explore recycling options for “as much of the site’s infrastructure as possible”.

“The site’s grid connection would require significant upgrades and today’s turbine-siting requirements would preclude the installation of latest generation turbines which can have an output of over five times that of Codrington’s current turbines.

“The company’s analysis considered the limitations of space on the site and necessary upgrades to modernise the grid equipment, ultimately resolving that a new project at Codrington is not financially viable for this location.”

Australia’s wind power industry is grappling with the prospect of an estimated 15,000 tonnes of turbine blade composite waste over the next decade.Credit: Jason South

Between 85 and 94 per cent of a wind turbine (by mass) is recyclable and can be recycled in Australia – mostly steel, aluminium, copper and cast iron.

The Clean Energy Council estimates that about 47,000 tonnes of metal will be decommissioned each year – about 1 per cent of the scrap metal recycled annually.

However, wind turbine blades – made from fibreglass and carbon fibre composite material – are far more challenging.

Strategy, campaigns and engagement general manager Dr Nicholas Aberle said recycling wind turbine blades was a challenge the sector would have to grapple with, like other industries.

“Wind turbine blades aren’t the only source of this type of waste; there are other sources of equivalent waste, which produce even more every year than wind turbines,” he said.

“It’s basically the same material as found in a lot of ships. So the recycling of this type of composite material is not a challenge that’s unique to the renewable energy sector. It’s one that many industries share.”

Aberle said Australia still had several years to come up with large-scale solutions for recycling turbine blades.

“We’re about to decommission a small wind farm which has, what is in the grander scheme of things, a fairly small amount of waste,” he said. “The composite waste volumes in Australia at the moment are such that the blades from Codrington are kind of a drop in the ocean compared to our overall amount of waste.”

Renewable energy giant ACCIONA, which operates in 40 countries, announced last week it was seeking innovation partners in Australia to explore transforming decommissioned wind turbine blades into new products, and its supplier Nordex is aiming for fully recyclable turbine blades by 2032.

The company said its recent wind farm developments would operate for 40 years, with the aim of extending that to 50 years soon.

Solar panels are already a multimillion-unit per year issue for Australia.

The Smart Energy Council estimates that across Australia more than 4 million rooftop solar panels are being retired each year and says the rate will grow rapidly.

By 2045, the council estimates 145 million solar panels will have been retired across Australia. Reforms are needed to prevent the majority of these materials being stockpiles, or even going into landfill, it says.

Currently, about 80 per cent of the retired solar panels are packed up and shipped overseas by Australian exporters, who sell them mostly to developing nations where they are set up to produce electricity once again.

But China is investing gargantuan sums in its solar panel manufacturing capability and the price of new panels is falling so rapidly the reuse market could soon become defunct.

Most of the panels not exported are lying behind garden sheds in backyards, in stockpiles in dusty warehouses or going into landfill.

There are several burgeoning solar panel recyclers in each state around Australia, but the industry is not considered to be profitable at the moment.

The Smart Energy Council is calling for government reform to mandate the recycling of panels to create a market for recyclers to strip the old panels and extract the valuable materials, including silver.

This could be a lucrative industry, with about 2.9 billion ounces of silver, worth about $3 billion, to be contained in the 145 million decommissioned panels over the next 20 years.

Zawee Energy managing director Carl Daley, a 28-year veteran of the energy industry, said the renewable energy sector would increasingly need to grapple with end-of-life issues.

“We faced that with solar panels as well … and we also had the same issue with large-scale batteries, trying to work out what we do with all the lithium after its economic life. So there’s certainly end-of-life issues for all those technologies. It’s the same for coal plants.”

For example, the average size 1000-megawatt coal plant burns more than 3 million tonnes of coal a year and generates about 300,000 tonnes of ash.

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