TIDMORSTED
On Ørsted's Capital Markets Day, the company announced its new
commitment to either reuse, recycle, or recover all of the wind turbine
blades in Ørsted's global portfolio of onshore and offshore wind
farms upon decommissioning. The commitment comes as a part of
Ørsted's new company strategy which includes an ambition to expand
its leading sustainability position and as part of the work towards
achieving a carbon-neutral footprint by 2040.
"We want to help create a world that runs entirely on green energy, and
we want to do it in a sustainable way. That includes moving towards more
circular models where we reuse resources and save energy, thereby
reducing carbon emissions. That is a big challenge, but we look forward
to working on this challenge together with our supply chain," says Mads
Nipper, CEO of Ørsted.
Today, between 85 % and 95 % of a wind turbine can be recycled, but
recycling of wind turbine blades remains a challenge, as the blades are
designed to be lightweight, yet durable, making them challenging to
break apart. Consequently, most decommissioned blades are landfilled
today. Should the challenge with recycling blades take longer to solve
than anticipated, Ørsted will not use landfilling for
decommissioned wind turbine blades, but will instead temporarily store
the blades.
In the coming decade, wind turbines will be deployed at an unprecedented
pace, delivering clean renewable energy to industries and to several
hundreds of million people, making it even more important to
decommission the blades in a sustainable way.
Ørsted has so far constructed 7.5 GW of offshore wind and 1.7 GW of
onshore wind. Up until now, Ørsted has only decommissioned the
offshore wind farm Vindeby in Denmark where the blades from the 11 wind
turbines were all reused. With Ørsted's new strategic ambition of
installing 30 GW of offshore wind and 17.5 GW of onshore energy
production, including onshore wind, by 2030, Ørsted has a clear
responsibility to help find solutions to the challenge of recycling
blades.
"Already today, power produced from offshore wind has 99 % lower life
cycle emissions than coal-fired power. Our ambition is to offer our
customers carbon-neutral renewable energy solutions with responsible use
of resources, seen from a life cycle perspective. This requires
decarbonising our supply chain, and it involves moving to more circular
models of resource use in the wind turbine supply chain," says Mads
Nipper.
"I hope that our commitment will inspire others which will help to bring
scale to the market for recycling solutions of wind turbine blades,
thereby accelerating the cost-out journey of the alternatives to
landfilling, and help boost the already ongoing innovation in the wind
energy supply chain on how to design to avoid waste."
Ørsted is already contributing to advance the technologies that can
recycle wind turbine blades in a sustainable way as a founding partner
of the cross-sector DecomBlades consortium consisting of wind industry
companies and research institutions. The consortium seeks to investigate
and develop solutions to recycle the composite material in wind turbine
blades. The consortium recently received a three-year funding from
Innovation Fund Denmark for its work.
"No one has all the solutions to how to move towards more circular
models. We need collaboration across companies and research institutions
to find the answers which the DecomBlades project is an important
example of," says Mads Nipper.
For further information, please contact:
Media Relations
Michael Korsgaard
+ 45 99 55 94 25
mikon@orsted.dk
Investor Relations
Allan Bødskov Andersen
+ 45 99 55 79 96
ir@orsted.dk
About Ørsted
The Ørsted vision is a world that runs entirely on green energy.
Ørsted develops, constructs, and operates offshore and onshore wind
farms, solar farms, energy storage facilities, and bioenergy plants, and
provides energy products to its customers. Ørsted ranks as the
world's most sustainable energy company in Corporate Knights' 2021 index
of the Global 100 most sustainable corporations in the world and is
recognised on the CDP Climate Change A List as a global leader on
climate action. Headquartered in Denmark, Ørsted employs 6,311
people. Ørsted's shares are listed on Nasdaq Copenhagen (Orsted).
In 2020, the group's revenue was DKK 52.6 billion (EUR 7.1 billion).
Visit orsted.com or follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and
Twitter.
Attachment
-- EN_sustain decom_press release_FINAL
https://ml-eu.globenewswire.com/Resource/Download/d2ccb6cf-e155-4bf0-bfe8-fff2d8682b5a
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
06-03-21 0215ET