project summary: 

Australia’s transition to renewable energy is driving rapid investment in wind energy infrastructure. As the first generations of commercial wind farms approach the end of their design lives, the Architecture, Construction and Engineering (ACE) sector faces an emerging challenge: how to plan for the decommissioning, material recovery and circular management of renewable energy infrastructure. While most wind turbine components can be recovered through established recycling pathways, composite blades remain difficult to manage because of their large dimensions, dispersed locations and limited specialised processing capacity. This creates a need to shift from reactive waste treatment towards proactive end-of-life infrastructure planning. 

Australia provides a particularly important context for this transition. Compared with mature wind energy markets in Europe and North America, large-scale wind farm decommissioning is expected to occur later, providing a valuable window to prepare appropriate recovery systems. However, Australia’s wind infrastructure is geographically dispersed, while states differ in deployment histories, anticipated decommissioning timelines, industrial capabilities, policy readiness and access to recovery facilities. Blade waste should therefore be understood not simply as a waste-management problem, but as a spatial and temporal infrastructure planning challenge. 

This research will develop a scenario-based, state-level framework to anticipate future wind turbine blade waste flows across Australia. Existing wind energy asset and project information, supported by technical evidence and representative cases, will be used to estimate when and where blade waste may arise under alternative lifetime and technology assumptions. These scenarios will be assessed against processing capacity, transport accessibility, interstate logistics and policy preparedness to identify regional readiness gaps and critical planning windows, and to explore alternative recovery-network configurations. 

By linking existing infrastructure information with future material flows and recovery needs, the research extends ACE lifecycle planning towards decommissioning, resource recovery and circularity. It aims to support a staged, regionally coordinated and data-informed approach to managing Australia’s future renewable energy infrastructure.