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Every year, hundreds to thousands of megawatts’ worth of wind turbines across the United States get a facelift. These aging turbines have their rotors swapped out, their blades replaced, and key components like the generator upgraded in order to enhance the machines’ ability to produce electricity from wind. This process is known as “repowering.” Included among the components that sometimes get replaced are magnets made with rare-earth elements like neodymium and dysprosium, which also play essential roles inside smartphones, laptops, and electric car motors.
The wide range of applications for rare-earth minerals translates into a lot of potential ways to repurpose the ingredients from spent wind turbine magnets. But today, most of these magnets wind up in landfills. It’s estimated that less than 1 percent of rare earths are recycled globally—from wind turbines, dead hard drives, and everything else.
The U.S. government, fearing a future rare-earth supply crunch that could hold back the energy transition, wants to change that. In January, the Department of Energy, or DOE, announced 20 winners of the first phase of its $5.1 million “Wind Turbine Materials Recycling Prize.” Funded by the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law, the prize seeks to develop “a cost-effective and sustainable recycling industry” for wind turbine components that aren’t being recycled commercially today, including wind turbine blades and the supersized magnets inside some generators. Each of the winning groups is receiving a $75,000 cash prize to help advance its recycling idea. If a team’s initial results are promising, it may go on to win an additional half a million dollars in cash, as well as a $100,000 voucher for technical assistance from a DOE national laboratory.
The end goal, said Tyler Christoffel, technology manager in the DOE’s…
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