The problem with Europe’s ageing wind farms

Image of cows and wind turbines

The swooshing of the wind turbines of Tahivilla is inescapable. Above wheat fields in one direction and sunflower slopes in another, the skyline of this gusty tip of southern Spain is a panorama of spinning blades.

The turbines were heralded as a vital step towards hitting the carbon emission targets outlined in the 1997 Kyoto protocol, the first legally binding international climate treaty. It was 2003 when the 98 state-of-the art machines were erected. Now their age is showing.

Planted next to the Strait of Gibraltar, they still have a capacity of 78.5 megawatts — enough to power 48,000 homes — and their dental whiteness has not faded. “But the technology is obsolete,” says Marta López Jiménez, director of renewable projects at Acciona Energía, which owns them. “There are no upgrades available.”

The battle against a warming planet may be critically urgent, but because wind power infrastructure is ageing, a crucial part of Europe’s energy future is a question rooted in the past: what to do with its oldest turbines?

About a fifth of the continent’s roughly 90,000 onshore turbines are at least 15 years old — and the normal lifespan of a wind farm with minimal maintenance is 20 years. In Spain, a pioneer of wind power in the 1990s along with Germany and Denmark, wind parks aged 15 or older are half of the total — the highest proportion in the EU, according to trade body WindEurope.

The end-of-life choices made by turbine owners, who must weigh up whether to invest more or walk away, have broader consequences. Their decisions will help determine how much progress the EU makes towards its goal of fostering energy independence and reaching net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

But decisions are looming at a time when parts of the wind industry are buckling under the strain of surging costs. What is best for the bloc’s electricity system — and indeed the planet — is not always the right choice for corporate owners. At the same time, there is pushback from local residents who do not want the vast structures in their backyard.

Joan Groizard Payeras, head of Spain’s Institute for Diversification and Energy Saving (IDAE), the government agency driving the push for net zero carbon emissions, says: “If we do nothing with these parks, if no decision is taken, there is a risk of losing a significant portion of renewable generation in Spain, and the rest of Europe, for the first time.”

Letting them expire would waste a valuable resource because the earliest wind farms are in prime sites with the strongest gales. Tarifa, the small province that includes Tahivilla, is a collision zone for Atlantic and Mediterranean winds.

Groizard estimates that closing down the old parks would result in the country losing between five and 10 gigawatts of wind power capacity in the years leading to 2030 — enough to supply 3mn-6mn Spanish homes.

Spain should be moving in the opposite direction. Its total wind capacity today is 30GW and its climate plan envisages more than doubling that to 62GW over the next six years. By 2030, renewables are meant to account for 81 per cent of the country’s electricity generation.

That is why Madrid, and the EU, are pushing for what experts call repowering: taking down the oldest turbines and using the same sites to erect cutting-edge new windmills, which are taller, more efficient and pump out more electricity. But the shift can be a costly, complicated process.

“I’m not saying it’s an easy win, but it’s a very rational way to increase capacity,” says Groizard.

New turbines outclass the old ones in the same way a high-performance Mercedes beats a vintage Renault 5, says José Entrecanales, chief financial and sustainability officer at Acciona Energía. “They’re even quite stylish.”

A typical 20-year-old machine, whose blade tips reach as high as 90 metres, generates 800kW. A new model produces 7,000kW with blades that rise to 240m or more, surpassing the height of the One Canada Square skyscraper in London’s Canary Wharf. A single rotation produces more energy than an average Spanish household consumes in a day.

Because new turbines capture more wind, WindEurope estimates that repowering on average triples a facility’s annual electricity output (in gigawatt hours) with a 25 per cent reduction in the number of machines. Deloitte estimates that repowering could deliver two-thirds of the increase in wind capacity Spain needs to meet its 2030 targets.

In Tahivilla, a site Acciona Energía bought from rival Endesa in 2009, Entrecanales has decided to repower. The company will dismantle 98 old turbines, replant vegetation, prepare new access roads and erect 13 bigger machines on new foundations at a cost of €120mn. It will be one of 29 Spanish repowering projects to receive a few million euros — €8mn in its case — from the Next Generation EU fund, which supports the bloc’s green transition.

The overhaul will start in May and take 18 months. It makes sense, Entrecanales says, because the company that made the turbines no longer exists and components are hard to find: “Therefore the maintenance cost of these assets starts to escalate over time.”

Each park, however, has to be assessed individually. A repowering overhaul means sacrificing, for a time, the steady cash flow that operators earn from selling electricity. “It comes down to the economics,” Entrecanales adds. “If you’ve got an asset that is profitable and doesn’t require much more investment, it doesn’t make sense to repower it.”

The simple alternative is to extend a turbine’s lifetime with a few replacement parts, whether that is new blades, gearboxes or generators. A carefully maintained existing machine can keep spinning for 35 or 40 years, but will not get the EU closer to its target of renewable power accounting for 42.5 per cent of overall energy consumption by 2030.

Giles Dickson, chief executive of WindEurope, says: “Of all of your old wind farms, what percentage are getting repowered? The answer is not enough. It’s quite a small proportion.”

One reason is the gradual disappearance of government-backed tariffs that incentivised the original wind farms by guaranteeing an above-market price to producers.

More critically, the wind industry endured a torrid 2023, getting battered by a combination of higher interest rates, elevated commodity prices, uncertain demand and strained supply chains. Siemens Energy, whose wind unit makes turbines, needed a €15bn bailout last year. Danish group Ørsted, the world’s largest offshore wind developer, this month announced up to 800 job cuts and slashed targets for new projects having booked $4bn of impairments last year.

Typical wind turbines from the early 2000s such as those in Tahivilla have a height of about 90m and a generating capacity of around 800kW

The current largest onshore turbines have a height of about 240m and a generating capacity of around 7,000kW

That’s higher than Canary Wharf’s One Canada Square, the UK’s third tallest building

Wind project costs in Europe have risen by 30-35 per cent since before the pandemic, according to one senior banker who works in renewables. The profitability of new projects in Spain, measured by their internal rate of return, plunged from a peak of 14 per cent in late 2022 to a trough of 6 per cent in mid-2023, according to UBS. Acciona Energía’s shares are down 43 per cent since the start of last year.

All those challenges make repowering more difficult. So too do permitting regulations and the management of electricity grid connections, which the wind sector complains are still insensitive, if not hostile, to its needs.

To make matters worse, wind developers are facing their own version of the “greenlash” against the costs of decarbonisation. The idea that “wind is woke” has taken hold among some critics who view renewables as a partisan leftwing cause.

But political conservatives are just one face of the opposition.

Since the early days of wind power, new turbines have sparked not-in-my-backyard resistance from local residents worried about alien objects ruining their rural vistas, as well as noise, electromagnetic interference and the “shadow flicker” cast by moving blades.

As the rollout of projects has accelerated in recent years, cases of Nimbyism have proliferated. Ecologists In Action, an alliance of Spanish groups, decries the “uncontrolled” onrush of turbines. VLAB, a German NGO, complains that they are creating “industrialised” landscapes. There are also protests against the “blade graveyards” where decommissioned parts are dumped, although Danish manufacturer Vestas is piloting a way to recycle them by separating their carbon fibre, fibreglass and epoxy resin.

Emotions are often heightened because the issues connect to deep-seated feelings about the rural-urban divide: wind projects, to some, are another example of the countryside being asked to make sacrifices for big cities and getting little in return.

Dickson at WindEurope argues the opponents of wind power are a small fraction of the population. “But those minority groups that do want to push back against it are better organised, better mobilised and better funded than they used to be,” he says.

The industry finds solace in surveys that suggest people living close to existing wind farms are more tolerant of them than those with no experience. First-hand contact tends to allay the worst fears, or at least demonstrate that the projects bring in new money: developers stump up local taxes, pay landowners to lease turbine plots and offer “sweeteners” to local communities by renovating village halls or building sports centres.

It is a factor than can make repowering easier for big companies than building new greenfield projects. “When we repower an existing asset, you have very positive acceptance,” says Carlotta Gentile Latino, who has overseen four such projects in France as executive vice-president at EDF Renewables. “People are already used to it.”

The time is probably the biggest cost. It increases the risk that some permits will lose their validity, that opposition will increase

She also sees a shift in perceptions linked to the energy crisis sparked by the Ukraine war and EU dependence on Russian gas. “Now people say: we need this electricity. I prefer to see this wind farm next to my garden. This is independence,” Gentile Latino adds.

Legal challenges rooted in environmentalism, however, are frequent. In Galicia in north-west Spain, roughly 100 projects have been stalled by disputes lodged with the region’s top court, says the local wind trade body. In 2022, the same court annulled the authorisation for the repowering of a wind farm where the owner, Portugal’s EDP, had already replaced 61 turbines with 7 larger ones. But Spain’s Supreme Court overturned the decision this month.

The key players in many legal battles are birds. The taller turbines become, the greater the collision threat they pose. Their blades may appear to move slowly, but the tips can be flying at nearly 300km an hour, says José Antonio Sarrión, an ornithologist, or bird expert, who has worked for wind developers in Tarifa. “When a blade hits a vulture, the bird is often split in half,” he adds.

Acciona Energía recorded 800 bird and bat deaths at its 168 Spanish wind farms in 2023, including 10 endangered creatures. Ten is “a meaningful number,” says Entrecanales. “But it’s not huge.”

In legal disputes, wind executives have argued for a need to diminish the weight given to wildlife protection, which has tended to take precedence over the role of wind farms in combating climate change and its public health effects.

Last November, the EU responded by enshrining a presumption that wind projects are of “overriding public interest” in a renewable energy directive. That will mean “judges now have to strike a balance”, says Dickson at WindEurope.

Even without concerns about wildlife, the wind sector is frustrated by the time it takes to get the stack of permits needed for repowering, which tends to be vetted the same way as a greenfield project.

In many countries, a realistic timeframe is five years, says Duarte Bello, EDP’s chief operating officer for Europe and Latin America.

France has sought to speed things up when repowering does not involve a “substantial” increase in turbine height, but the granting of permits and construction of new projects there can take eight to nine years. “The time is probably the biggest cost,” Bello says. “It increases the risk that some permits will lose their validity, that opposition will increase.”

An associated obstacle, most pronounced in Spain, is the need to upgrade connections to the electricity grid to handle the energy from bigger turbines. Spain allocates its grid connections on a first-come, first-served basis, which has left repowering projects at the back of the queue. The government now wants to prioritise the best projects, but change comes slowly, even though the EU is pushing for it.

Kadri Simson, EU energy commissioner, lamented in October that the bloc had four times more wind capacity waiting for permits than under construction. As the commission announced measures to support the strained sector, she said: “The goal is to ensure that no time is lost to screening and approving projects.” In Spain, Groizard says the country “can do things much better”, but that environmental assessments are necessary to avoid any perception of a “free for all”.

Óscar Pérez of Qualitas Energy, an investment group that buys, consolidates and repowers small wind farms in Germany, pinpoints the main cause of Europe’s regulatory bottleneck: a “dichotomy” between climate targets set at EU or national level and subnational regulators that pull in different directions. “The more you standardise the process and the clearer the rules are, the less discretion there is going to be in the regions,” he says.

Down the highway from Tahivilla is a mountaintop wind farm, El Cabrito, which was built in 1995 and repowered by Acciona Energía in 2018.

Birdwatchers on the company payroll rustle in the undergrowth, dispatching orders via smartphones to stop blades spinning within 15 seconds if they see a bird approaching.

Inside one turbine a technician is doing maintenance on the lift that carries workers to the top, a welcome upgrade from the ladders they once had to scale.

If repowering is to accelerate, Entrecanales says, a fast-track to secure permits is needed. “It should be easier to repower than to build a brand new wind farm,” he says. Until that happens, the countries still reckoning with the implications of their ageing machines will find that time is not on their side.

Graphic illustration by Ian Bott