‘We will be on our knees’ without diverse supply chain in Europe, wind industry conference told
‘We will be on our knees’ without diverse supply chain in Europe, wind industry conference told | Windpower Monthly
The comments were made in a panel discussion on Wednesday (20 March) examining how Europe can create a more resilient supply chain for its homegrown wind industry.
Among the speakers was Maive Rute, the deputy director general at the European Commission’s directorate general for internal market, Industry, entrepreneurship and SMEs, who pointed out the brittle nature of relying on a homogenous, exterior supply chain for key components.
“Most of [the supply chain] is fine, and then we will have a key component that we are totally dependent on, and then with any supply chain disruption we will be on our knees,” she said.
“We need to think in terms of a supply chain diversity… away from the single provider, which would help us on a rainy day,” Rute added, referencing the commission’s recent Critical Raw Materials Act(CRMA).
The act aims to make all 27 EU member states more self-sufficient in the supply and production of critical raw materials for wind energy. For example, it mandates that at least 10% of the EU’s annual consumption of critical raw materials such as lithium, cobalt, and rare earth metals should come from extraction within member states, while at least 40% of production of those materials should occur within the bloc.
Other speakers at the session highlighted the importance of diversifying a supply chain by focusing on European manufacturing, and the challenges of doing so while meeting the additional provisions in the CRMA, such as using recycled materials in wind manufacturing.
Hanif Marshall, who was recently appointed the new CEO of GE Vernova’s blade manufacturing subsidiary LM Windpower, described the need to scale up recycling processes in order to "green" wind manufacturing while strengthening Europe’s supply chain.
“We have the technologies to deliver recycled materials. I think the next step is coming to industrialisation of the recycling of these blades and that's where the next step is to have factories that can recycle materials,” he said.
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