AS Scotland’s wind energy sector develops, the SNP Government has made clear its aim to “deliver a sustainable supply chain that will benefit all of Scotland for decades to come”.
Speaking in December, acting Energy Secretary Gillian Martin said that building such a supply chain would be key in “accelerating our journey to net zero”.
But while this sounds like similar rhetoric as we hear from politicians of all stripes, James Barry, the chief executive of the Scotland-based firm Renewables Parts, has a vision of what that looks like in practice.
“This is going to be one of the most dramatic developments in the wind industry,” he says. “The whole supply chain is pivoting from linear to circular.
“You can't be serious and committed to net zero without decarbonising your supply chain, which means reusing parts.
“What I'm saying is that the industry needs to make this step, is starting to make this step, and within a relatively short period of time will have made a dramatic change. I would say within a decade over 60-70% of parts will be reused.”
As it stands, Barry says that while wind energy is renewable – building the turbines that harvest that energy is not. Parts are made, used, scrapped, and replaced with a new version in a carbon-intensive process.
But coming from a background in aerospace engineering, the Renewables Parts chief executive says he has seen how the wind sector can mature.
“If you took aerospace – or oil and gas or even nuclear – and you looked at the practices going on there, there is a heck of a lot of remanufacturing going on; 80% of a gas turbine engine on an aircraft is remanufactured, it's reused,” Barry explains.
“These practices are well established and they're well ingrained elsewhere – and they're going to come to the wind industry. The question really is the speed at which that cut across happens.
“Our business is agitating and pushing hard for customers to adopt remanufacture, reuse solutions in preference to buying new parts and we're probably – well, we are – the market lead in that regard.
“We're one of the few companies in the world that actually does it.”
“We were pushing this idea strongly, but it was an idea ahead of its time,” the chief executive said. “The wind industry was not receptive or interested back early last decade, not interested at all, really.
“It's only been since 2017, 2018 that we've got some real traction and then it’s skyrocketed. It's just grown exponentially since that point.
“You’ve got to remember the wind industry is still very young, relatively, we're still first generation, we're 30 years in.
“The emphasis in the wind industry has been on building turbines, developing turbines, installing them, increasing capacity, and moving the energy grid mix to a renewable footing – and we've seen that very successfully in the last 30 years.
“The attention or priority given to making the aftermarket more sustainable and reusing parts has been much, much lower. It will come – and is coming at a rush.”
Barry said that what Renewables Parts is doing is not “reinventing the wheel”, but applying knowledge from other engineering sectors to wind energy.
He sees a bright future – and says there is both a “practical necessity, and there’s a moral necessity” to it.
“Refurbishment is, generally, a fraction of the cost of new – maybe 60% of new, 2/3 of the price – and the other point is availability,” he explains.
“If you are digging up iron ore or whatever mineral from the ground, then forging and making fabrication, the lead times to these are long. But if the part exists within the assets in the turbine today, refurbishing that actually is a relatively quick process.
“So, you can boost parts availability and get much better response times from the supply chain.”
