Energy Company Converts Old Wind Turbine Into a Tiny Home

Vattenfall, a Swedish energy company, and Superuse, an international design studio based in Rotterdam, have teamed up to repurpose an old, decommissioned wind turbine into a tiny home.

In a new project on display for Dutch Design Week running from October 19-27, Vattenfall set out to showcase circular solutions in the wind energy sector. It worked with Superuse to convert an old wind turbine that had been operating for 20 years in Austria.

The house spans 4 meters wide, 10 meters long, and 3 meters tall, and as part of its mission to achieve a fossil fuel-free future, Vattenfall equipped this tiny home with eco-friendly components including solar panels, a heat pump and a solar water heater. The project was designed by Superuse and developed by Blade-Made, a spin-off of Superuse, and Woodwave.

Superuse chose to build within the nacelle of a Vestas V80 2MW turbine model, which had a very small interior, to meet local building codes. That means future converted turbines could have even larger nacelles for more spacious homes.

Despite the small interior, the resulting home comes equipped with many standard creature comforts, including a kitchen, bathroom and living area. However, as reported on the Dutch Design Week website, this tiny home also has a reconfigurable interior that can be converted into a work studio, extra office space, vacation home and more.

The tiny home helped salvage the steel and other metals and concretes that could otherwise go to waste when a wind turbine is decommissioned. The house is also furnished with sustainably made and secondhand pieces.

“At least ten thousand of this generation of nacelles are available, spread around the world. Most of them have yet to be decommissioned,” Jos de Krieger, partner at Superuse and Blade-Made, said in a statement. “This offers perspective and a challenge for owners and decommissioners. If such a complex structure as a house is possible, then numerous simpler solutions are also feasible and scalable.”

As part of the design exhibition, Vattenfall also collaborated with several other design firms to reimagine uses for old wind turbines. With Cepezed, it created Floating Platforms from wind turbine blades. Vattenfall and Interactivist developed the project Turbine Times to turn the data on the decommissioned wind turbines into interactive, meaningful data visualizations about the energy transition. For the fourth collaboration on display in the exhibit, Vattenfall and Studio Carbon developed Vision 2050, a solution for wind turbine decommission that presents ideas for circularity.

“We are looking for innovative ways in which you can reuse materials from used turbines as completely as possible,” said Thomas Hjort, director of innovation at Vattenfall. “So making something new from them with as few modifications as possible. That saves raw materials, energy consumption and in this way we ensure that these materials are useful for many years after their first working life.”

According to a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory survey, wind turbines have a life expectancy of about 20 to 30 years. As the Union of Concerned Scientists reported, wind turbines, particularly the blades, can be difficult to recycle because of the mixed materials and the strength of these materials to make the turbines durable. 

As such, scientists have been working on ways to make the recycling process easier and more cost-effective, such as through developing resins that are simpler to recycle.

Companies like Vattenfall are continuing to consider methods of repurposing turbine parts to further extend the lifespan of these wind turbines and prevent them from going to landfills. For instance, Stora Enso and Voodin Blade Technology GmbH are working on making sustainably sourced wood turbine blades that can easily be reused at the end of their lifespans, and Canvus is repurposing wind turbine parts into furniture.