BZ INTERVIEW with the wind power entrepreneur Andreas Markowsky on the dismantling of wind turbines in the region.
What happens to old wind turbines from the region when they are replaced by more powerful systems? That’s what Katharina Meyer wanted to know from Andreas Markowsky, whose free power group in Freiburg currently has 30 systems in operation.
BZ: Have you already dismantled old systems?
Markowsky: A whole series, a total of ten pcs. Recently in Kippenheim we were even able to sell the entire system to Eastern Europe for 20,000 euros. All in all, we have been able to reuse parts in every single system so far.
BZ: How can you imagine that?
Markowsky: Parts are often reused as spare parts stores for other wind turbines of the same type – such as the generator. Anything that cannot be sold will be scrapped. There are companies that specialize in this – they dismantle the entire wind turbine and bring it to recycling. The generator contains a lot of copper, which has a high scrap value, there is a lot of steel in the towers that can be recycled, even the crumbled concrete from the substructure is still used for road construction. At the end you can’t see anything anymore. The scrap value often even covers the cost of dismantling.
BZ: It’s more difficult with the wings?
Markowsky: That’s correct. Ideally, they will also be reused. But mostly they are burned. The vast majority of wings are made of glass fiber reinforced plastic. They are burned as schnitzel in special ovens, for example in a large plant in Bremen.
BZ: Couldn’t the wind turbines also be left running?
Markowsky: The new systems are significantly more efficient. The system that we want to build in 2023 at the Holzschlgermatte in Freiburg will generate ten million kilowatt hours of electricity per year – it replaces two old systems that together generated five million.
–
