Since 2000, wind energy has increased drastically across the globe. In the United States alone, wind electricity generation has risen from 6 billion kilowatt-hours in 2000 to about 430 billion in 2023.
This is an increase of over 7,000%.
But most wind turbines have a life span of about 20 years, meaning much of the initial wind energy infrastructure has been or will soon be decommissioned worldwide.
European clean energy company Vattenfall has an innovative idea for the next chapter of these wind turbines.
“We are looking for innovative ways in which you can reuse materials from used turbines as completely as possible,” said Thomas Hjort, Vattenfall’s director of innovation.
“So making something new from them with as few modifications as possible. That saves raw materials, energy consumption and in this way we ensure that these materials are useful for many years after their first working life.”
In partnership with Dutch design firm Superuse Studios, Vattenfall introduced a novel idea: A tiny home made out of a recycled wind turbine.
Their prototype includes 387-square-feet of interior space and debuted to the public at Dutch Design Week in the fall of 2024.
Designers at Superuse worked to design a building-code compliant house in the smallest available nacelle, an enclosure that houses the top part of a V80 2MW wind turbine.
This nacelle was four meters wide, ten meters long, and three meters high, and was repurposed from a turbine that stood in Austria for two decades.
“Most parts of a wind turbine — the foundation, tower, gearbox parts and generator — are made of metal or concrete and therefore easily recyclable,” Vattenfall’s website explains. “Steel, for instance, can be melted down and reused, but the downside is that this takes a lot of energy and creates emissions.”
To convert the nacelle into a tiny home in the most sustainable way possible, the turbine decommissioning company Business in Wind removed and recycled the interior parts of the nacelle. Then, the team transported the shell of the nacelle on a flatbed truck, according to Fast Company.
Then, Superuse laid out the interior design to meet Dutch tiny home design codes and incorporated insulation and appropriate exits. The team was successful, completing a final design that includes a fully functioning toilet and shower, a kitchen with a sink and stove, a pullout couch, and an electric heat pump.
Solar panels on the roof also provide extra power, and the home even has a two-way hookup for electric vehicles, meaning the vehicle can help power the home, or vice versa.
The prototype was also furnished with sustainably made or secondhand furniture with the company Reliving. This includes a table that was made of material from a recycled wind turbine blade.
“At least 10,000 of this generation of nacelles are available, spread around the world,” Jos de Krieger, a partner from Superuse, said in a press release, about the potential to expand this kind of design.
“Most of them have yet to be decommissioned. This offers perspective and a challenge for owners and decommissioners. If such a complex structure as a house is possible, then numerous simpler solutions are also feasible and scalable.”
The existing structure is a one-off prototype, which aimed to answer Dutch Design Week’s question: “What if a decommissioned wind turbine could become a gold mine of resources?”
But Hjort said there’s a world of possibilities when it comes to a second life for these wind turbines.
“It would be possible to do 2,000 tiny houses per year, if you wanted to, on the same template [Superuse Studios created] for the next five years,” Hjort told Fast Company.
Vattenfall itself is not planning to develop real estate, but Hjort said “it’s possible to build a business on doing it,” and that the company “cannot neglect the obligation we have to push the envelope in all aspects of our life cycle.”
Superuse Studios and other collaborative partners are, however, considering a larger production scale of the tiny homes, especially following the interest garnered at Dutch Design Week.
Regardless of what happens next for the tiny home, the world will continue to seek solutions for scalable, sustainable living to combat housing and climate crises alike.
“Whether it will fly or not, who knows?” Hjort told Fast Company. “But what we are definitely saying is that it is a real opportunity. There’s interest for it.”
Header image courtesy of Vattenfall/Jorrit Lousberg
