The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has announced the six final winners of the Wind Turbine Materials Recycling Prize. Each team was awarded $500,000 in cash prizes, as well as $100,000 in vouchers to work with DOE national laboratories, for creating cost-effective recycling technologies that will increase the sustainability of U.S. wind energy systems.
This combined $3.6 million will expand domestic capabilities for the recycling and recovery of wind materials as teams use their winnings to bring their technologies closer to commercialisation.
In January of this year, 20 teams were selected as winners of the first phase of the prize, Initiate!, and awarded $75,000 each for their innovative wind material recycling concepts that focused on economic and environmental sustainability. These teams have since been competing in the final Accelerate! phase, where they have worked to further develop their concepts, perform prototype demonstrations of their technologies, and submit a plan to demonstrate the technology at full scale.
The Accelerate! phase winners are:
- Cimentaire (Houston, Texas)
- Critical Materials Recycling (Boone, Iowa)
- Fletcher Team (Huntington, West Virginia)
- GreenTex Solutions, LLC (Charleston, South Carolina)
- United Standard Materials Corporation (Houston, Texas)
- Wind Rewind (Orono, Maine).
The winning teams can use their $500,000 cash award and technical support vouchers to advance their prototypes toward relevant scale demonstration and validation. While Accelerate! is the final competition phase of the Wind Turbine Materials Recycling Prize, a Pitch Day event is planned for 2025, at which participants will have the opportunity to present work completed since the close of the prize and demonstrate the commercial potential of their technologies.
