What does living in the turbine of a wind turbine mean to you? Rest assured, there is no question of being perched on a mast a few hundred meters above sea level, but of remaining on the ground in a “tiny house” reserved for fans of industrial equipment. The size of the apartment is modest: 4 meters wide, 10 meters long and 3 meters high. There is a kitchen, a bathroom and the essential tools of modern comfort: a heat pump, solar panels and a solar water heater. With, of course, compliance with standards for housing use.
Exhibited at the Dutch design week in Eindhoven (Netherlands) until October 27, the prototype was designed by the Swedish energy company Vattenfall, in collaboration with Dutch design studios, Blade-Made and Woodwave. “We are looking for innovative ways to reuse the materials from used turbines as a whole as much as possible“, underlines Thomas Hjort, Vattenfall’s director of innovation, who put four agencies into competition as part of this project.
VOS INDICES
source
A turbine widely available on the market
To carry out the project, it was first necessary to select a sufficiently large turbine. The Vestas V80-2.0 model, with an initial power of 2 MW, meets the criterion. There are at least 10,000 copies, spread around the world, most of which have not yet been dismantled. Enough to imagine the demonstration extended beyond the proof of concept.
This is the first model operated by Vattenfall whose gondola is large enough for a small house. The turbine converted by Vattenfall was installed in 2005 in an Austrian wind farm in Gols. The turbine nacelles built subsequently are, for the most part, larger.
The Dutch company Reliving, specializing in second-hand furniture, took advantage of the project to exhibit its know-how with the installation of second-hand furniture, but also the installation of a table containing materials from a blade recycled wind turbine. No indicative price of the “house” has yet been communicated.
At Dutch Design Week, visitors can also see floating islands constructed from wind engine blades, as well as works of art created from data provided by the turbines during their operating cycle. A sign of the scale of the subject, the Danish wind turbine manufacturer Vestas, for its part, presented in 2023 a chemical process making it possible to decompose epoxy resin in order to facilitate the recycling of wind turbine blades.
Source: www.usinenouvelle.com
