Xcel recycled 603 Minnesota wind-turbine blades weighing 4,188 tons into cement-kiln fuel; its repowered wind farms were expected to save customers $160 million

Wind turbine blades that once stood over Minnesota cornfields are now being processed into fuel for cement kilns, an unglamorous but concrete example of the practical, less-publicized side of the clean energy transition. According to Xcel Energy's 2022 Sustainability Report, two of the utility's wind-farm "repowering" projects removed 603 old turbine blades in 2022 in Minnesota, for a total of approximately 4,188 tons of blades, which were then shredded and used as alternative fuel in cement kilns.

Why wind blades are a recycling problem

Wind energy is often presented as a clean alternative to fossil fuels, and in many respects it is. However, the industry's dirty little secret: turbine blades are huge, almost unrecyclable, fiberglass-resin behemoths that can sometimes stretch several lengths of a football field. Over the years, they’ve been cut into chunks and sent to landfills.

A 2021 peer-reviewed study titled “Wind turbine blade material in the United States: Quantities, costs, and end-of-life options,” led by NREL, found that by 2050, wind turbine blades could contribute up to millions of tons of waste across the United States, or more, based on continued growth and proliferation. Addressing this will depend on advances in blade design and recycling technology, alongside supportive policy. That is, it is not a problem America can solve by simply spinning wind turbines without implementing the necessary recycling infrastructure to keep up.

So, what did Xcel do?

The blades removed from the Nobles and Grand Meadow wind farms in 2022 were trucked to a Veolia processing plant in Missouri, where they were ground into material and used as an alternative fuel in cement kilns, displacing coal and raw minerals such as silica and limestone. According to the Minnesota Star Tribune, cement kilns have become the preferred disposal method nationally due to a lack of other recycling markets for blade material.

These two Minnesota projects were part of a larger, approved plan under which Xcel is repowering four wind farms in Minnesota and North Dakota: Nobles, Grand Meadow (now known as Ben Fowke Wind Energy Center), Border Wind, and Pleasant Valley, as part of roughly $750 million in repowering investment. Across all four projects, Xcel's 2022 Sustainability Report projects approximately $160 million in customer energy-cost savings over the next 25 years, driven by the greater efficiency of newer turbines rather than by the blade-recycling process itself. Xcel has acknowledged that recycling the blades costs three to eight times more than landfilling them; the company pursued it regardless.

Why should this matter

To be clear about when each figure applies: the 603-blade removal and 4,188-ton total are 2022 figures, drawn from Xcel's 2022 Sustainability Report. The NREL blade-waste study was published in 2021 and models projections out to 2050. The $160 million in customer savings is a projection covering a 25-year period from the time of repowering (roughly 2022–2047). As of 2026, these are historical and projected figures rather than a new or ongoing development.

Recycling wind turbine blades at scale remains an unresolved industrial challenge, but 603 blades, out of the tens of thousands expected to be decommissioned across the U.S. in the coming decades, represent a working, if imperfect and costlier, alternative to landfilling. The broader transition away from fossil fuels will likely involve many similarly incremental, unglamorous efforts like this one, rather than a single decisive breakthrough.