Circular economy and wind turbines: what happens once their useful life is over?
March 27, 2025
Wind is one of the most powerful allies for generating clean energy. Wind farms are able to convert its power into renewable electricity with no carbon footprint, but they also open up other challenges in environmental management. Although to the public wind infrastructures seem at first glance to be potentially eternal, their parts (components) have a life that, although long, is limited. Wind turbines need to be refurbished when they reach a certain age: at 25 or 30 years, they need to be upgraded with new material.
This offers new opportunities, such as repowering, but also requires new waste management. Unused wind turbine blades are brought back into the life cycle thanks to the circular economy, which makes use of their materials and converts them into new products. This is what EnergyLOOP, a joint venture between FCC Ámbito and Perseo Iberdrola Ventures, does, focusing on the reuse and recycling of wind turbine blades.
EnergyLOOP thus prevents the blades from becoming a simple waste product in a landfill. In doing so, it reduces the carbon footprint of energy companies and their wind farms, while opening up new economic opportunities and creating green jobs.
This last point is crucial because, broadly speaking, the circular economy and the green transition are creating new opportunities in jobs and talent. They are creating new professions, new skills and sometimes even new opportunities in geographical areas with problems in generating employment or attracting young people.
Bearing in mind that in Spain there are some 1371 wind farms with 66,630 blades that will need to be renewed at some point, the opportunity seems clear.It is also an opportunity in the short term: 442 wind farms will reach the key date of 25 years of age by 2030.
Green employment opportunities
EnergyLOOP already has an industrial wind blade recycling facility in Cortes (Navarra), which is expected to be operational in the coming months. As its managing director, Federico Sanmartín, confirms, the plant ‘is already incorporating infrastructures, equipment and personnel’ and already has authorisation for the reception and storage of blades. In fact, it already has the material with which it will inaugurate its work, the waste from two wind farms in Albacete.
The plant is thus an exponent of the opportunities of the circular economy and, in particular, of green jobs. In the coming years, the number of professions connected with sustainability, circularity and clean energy will increase. The European Union estimates that around 700,000 jobs will be created in the EU by 2030 as a result of circularity. The transition to the circular economy, they conclude, will serve to ‘increase competitiveness, stimulate innovation, boost economic growth and create jobs’.
Their calculations are similar to those of the International Labour Organisation (ILO), which estimates that millions of green jobs will appear worldwide during this decade. Thus, by 2030, the green economy will create 24 million new jobs.Of these, 2.5 million will be linked to renewable energies.
Companies such as EnergyLOOP will be responsible for generating these new green jobs and creating new opportunities.
