Charting a circular path for wind energy

Most of India’s conversation on circularity in clean energy has gathered around batteries and solar panels, and with reason, since the country imports all its lithium, cobalt and nickel and holds both sectors to producer-responsibility rules. Wind has stayed at the edge of that conversation, partly because it is the most mature part of India’s clean-tech economy, built over three decades into the world’s third-largest wind manufacturing base, and partly because 80% to 94% of a turbine by mass is steel, copper, aluminium and iron that existing scrap markets recover.

Both facts have encouraged a belief that wind’s end of life will look after itself, and for towers and nacelles it largely does. A blade, however, is glass or carbon fibre set in thermoset resin, built to bend through 20 to 25 years of monsoon winds and extremely hard to take apart once cured. India has no framework for blade disposal, no landfill ban and no producer responsibility for turbines, and its 2023 repowering policy leaves the scrap from replaced machines to general industrial waste rules.

The Institute for Competitiveness, in its report on circularity in clean-tech, which models India’s wind blade waste year by year and state by state, sets out how the problem will arrive. It follows every turbine from the factory, where part of each blade’s material is lost as scrap, to its twenty-first year, when the whole blade comes down, and assumes capacity reaches 100 GW by 2030 and keeps growing at that pace.

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On that basis India produces between 20,000 and 25,000 tonnes of blade waste a year until the mid-2030s, almost all of it off-cuts and rejects from blade factories, because no full generation of turbines retires before 2035-36. Annual waste then more than quadruples in two years, peaking at 96,050 tonnes in 2036-37, when the 5.5 GW that developers rushed to commission in 2016-17, before feed-in tariffs gave way to reverse auctions, comes down at once.