A bibliometric, social network and clustering analysis for a comprehensive review on end-of-life wind turbines

Abstract

Green energy production has gained significance during recent years due to the Paris agreement considering carbon emissions. One of the leading sources of energy production in the aforementioned aspects is wind energy. Even though the service life of a wind turbine (WT) is considered long (20–40 years), it is expected to confront a significant number of end-of-life (EOL) WTs in the medium term. In order to acquire maximum value, operations for EOL WTs have a crucial place. These operations are mainly referred as recycling, decommissioning, remanufacturing, and disposal. There are several key factors confronted during these processes such as transportation, center attendance, route decision, integration into circular economy, and disassembly of WTs etc. Therefore, a sustainable process is required for dealing with WTs at the EOL in order to maximize the environmental benefits of wind power and value creation. A comprehensive literature review was conducted in this study in order to accomplish the aforementioned aim, demonstrate the state-of-art-applications, and detect gaps. Almost 530 studies, which were conducted till January of 2022, are taken into consideration in the proposed study. According to the results of the implemented analysis in the proposed study, the examined studies focused on WT blade integration into the circular economy, regulations, mechanical properties of recycled materials, supply chain issues, and so on. However, total life cycle assessment is not entirely considered as a whole. In addition, some critical gaps in the literature are detected, which are given as follows: combining the entire dismantling and repowering, investigating the variables that can help or hinder WT recovery in the long run, requirement for investigating the roles of technological breakthroughs, regulatory measures, and incentives in renewable technology investment and production, and infrastructure and transportation data must be factored in to solve location allocation difficulties for disposal or disassembly plants. The proposed literature review consists of three main parts; the first part demonstrates bibliometric analysis of considered literature. The second part includes the descriptive analysis, and the third part comprehends the details of the received studies. In the third part, a detailed analysis of the studies is conducted. In the fourth part, interpretation of examined studies is proposed. At the end, gaps in the considered literature are detected and proposals for potential study subjects are indicated.