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neowa GmbH, a leading provider of wind turbine decommissioning, is pleased to announce the successful completion of a strategic investment by Vidia Climate Fund I (“Vidia”). The partnership is a significant milestone in neowa’s development and confirms our role as a key player in the sustainable energy industry.

With the partnership, neowa will further expand its services for the wind industry and for repowering. More than 10,000 wind turbines in Germany have reached the end of their service life, so renewing them and replacing them with modern, more powerful turbines through repowering is essential for the energy transition. “We will not only support our customers in dismantling old turbines safely and efficiently, but also offer tailored services. This raises energy efficiency and lowers CO2 emissions, and it helps our customers reach their goal of a more sustainable future,” says Mika Lange, Managing Director of neowa GmbH.

Strategic partnership with Ven-to: working together

The new partnership with Ven-to, a leading Danish service provider in the wind industry and also part of the Vidia Wind Services platform, gives neowa more ways to broaden its service portfolio and offer integrated solutions. By combining the strengths of both companies, we can cover the whole value chain across the life of a wind turbine, from service to decommissioning. For our customers this means even more efficiency and smoothly managed projects.

Scaling and internationalisation: ready for growth

The partnership with Vidia allows us to scale and to expand into new geographic markets. This includes hiring additional specialists, improving internal processes and acquiring further specialised service providers. Together with Vidia, we are well placed to meet the growing demand in the wind energy market and to offer our customers first-class solutions in new markets as well.

neowa GmbH is a founding member of RDRWind e. V. and works in its working groups on compliance with and the development of standards that should be followed when decommissioning wind turbines.

From 2021, a wave of decommissioning is coming to the German wind industry. Around 30,000 wind turbines are turning in Germany today, and every second one will reach the end of its service life within the next ten years. At the turn of 2020/2021 alone, the 20-year funding under the Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG) ends for about 5,200 turbines, and another 8,000 follow by the end of 2025.

Until now there was no standard for dismantling and recycling wind turbines, neither in Germany nor in Europe. That changed on 17 July 2020, when the German Institute for Standardisation (DIN) published DIN SPEC 4866, “Sustainable decommissioning, dismantling, recycling and recovery of wind turbines”. It sets the framework for the whole process, from planning and execution to documentation.

DIN SPEC 4866 recommends, for example, how the site should be secured and which qualifications the workers need. It describes how rotor blades, tower and nacelle are taken apart, which safety measures keep harmful substances out of the environment, how the components can be recovered, how the work is documented and which permits each federal state requires.

The document was written by 25 experts from the wind and recycling industries, research and authorities such as the German Environment Agency, on the initiative of RDRWind e. V., the industry association for repowering, dismantling and recycling of wind turbines. DIN SPEC 4866 is available free of charge in German and English from DIN Media (formerly Beuth Verlag).