Recycling Infrastructure for Wind Turbines and Systems in the U.S.
This online engineering PDH course provides a detailed assessment of the U.S. recycling infrastructure for wind energy systems, addressing the urgent challenge of managing end-of-life wind turbines as deployment scales to meet national decarbonization targets.
Based on the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Wind Energy Technologies Office study, this course outlines RD&D priorities to transition the wind sector toward a circular economy. It examines wind energy material compositions, projected waste streams through 2050, and current U.S. recycling capacity.
This course also addresses hard-to-recycle components such as fiber-reinforced composites in blades and nacelles, rare-earth magnets in generators, and critical alloying elements in steels, while exploring recycling challenges and opportunities for foundations, towers, drivetrains, electronics, and cabling.
In addition, this course highlights short-, medium-, and long-term RD&D pathways from near-term solutions like cement coprocessing and magnet-to-magnet recycling to future innovations including modular blade designs, bio-based composites, and advanced rare-earth refining. Life-cycle assessment (LCA), techno-economic analysis (TEA), and case studies are presented to assess the environmental, economic, and technical impacts of different recycling approaches.
This 9 PDH online course is applicable to engineers, sustainability managers, as well as other technical professionals interested in learning more about recycling technologies of wind energy infrastructure.
This PE continuing education course is intended to provide you with the following specific knowledge and skills:
- Understanding the scale of projected U.S. wind turbine deployments and the resulting end-of-life waste streams
- Knowing major material categories in wind systems (steel, concrete, composites, critical materials) and their life cycle impacts
- Evaluating existing U.S. recycling infrastructure and its capacity to manage decommissioned wind system components
- Learning about recycling challenges for key components including blades, nacelles, towers, drivetrains, and permanent magnets
- Assessing short-, medium-, and long-term RD&D priorities to improve recovery of fiber composites, rare earths, and critical alloys
- Comparing technical, economic, and environmental metrics for recycling processes using LCA and TEA
- Familiarizing yourself with strategies for design-for-disassembly, modularity, and reuse in future wind energy technologies
- Recognizing cross-sector opportunities for recycled materials and secondary market development
- Exploring community, workforce, and policy considerations in building a circular economy for wind systems
- Applying course insights to planning, policy, and engineering solutions that strengthen U.S. supply chain security and sustainability
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