White shoe brigade is back, this time with recycled wind turbine blades

What could possibly be more disconcerting than seeing a Queensland state politician at a formal dinner in a suit with white running shoes?  This is after all the home of the “white shoe brigade” of property developers and flamboyant politicians that proliferated during the Bjelke Petersen years in the 70s and 80s.

But here he was: State energy minister Mick de Brenni turning up at the Clean Energy Council’s state dinner on Tuesday in very white sandshoes.

But it was to make a point, a little bit about sustainable fashion, and mostly about sustainability in general. The shoes are made from recycled wind farm blades, and are a joint effort between Spanish energy giant Acciona and Spanish fashion group El Ganso.

They were presented to the minister during the official opening of Acciona’s Aldoga solar project a few weeks ago, which will be one of the state’s biggest. Acciona is also building the 923 MW Macintyre wind farm in the same state, which will also be the country’s biggest when complete, at least for a while.

“I wanted to wear them to make a point tonight about being innovative about how we tell our story to Australians about the clean energy transition industry,” de Brenni told the audience, numbering nearly 500 at the Brisbane Convention Centre.

Recycling wind turbine components is a relatively new industry, given that the first wind projects only started being erected at scale in the last few decades.

But new industries are emerging, with studies showing that 90 per cent of wind turbine components can be relatively easily recycled, because they use metals including steel, aluminum, and copper.

The wind turbine blades present a bigger challenge because they use a lot of fibreglass, resins and polymers. But this is what El Ganso and Acciona are using for these limited edition shoes that were officially launched last December.

The shoes’ soles have been manufactured using materials from dismantled wind turbine blades that have undergone a micronizing process, which reduces the size of fiberglass and epoxy resins to microns. The resulting powder is combined with rubber to obtain a sole that maintains the strength, grip and durability of conventional shoes.

The limited edition shoes – and presumably the pair that de Brenni was wearing – came from a 23 metre long blade from the Aibar wind farm in Navarra, Spain, that had been operating since 1998.

Acciona anticipates 20,000 wind turbine blades will need to be recyclable in the near future, as thousands of wind turbines approach the end of their operational lifetime.

“The blades are more complex to recycle,” Acciona says. “The main challenge is to develop solutions that are both sustainable from an environmental standpoint and economically viable at large scale.” It recently announced the construction of an industrial-scale wind blade recycling plant – dubbed Waste2Fiber in Navarra.

De Brenni has for the past four years been overseeing the start of what he says is one of the most significant decarbonisation programs in the world – taking the country’s most coal dependent state to an 85 per cent share of renewables by 2035.

Queensland remains the state with the lowest share of renewables in Australia, but that could change because it is considered the best place for new developments for wind, solar and storage.

This is largely due to removing planning blockages (although some projects in contentious areas have been blocked), and a different approach to creating renewable energy zones, and doing these on a merchant basis rather than the complex regulatory basis that has caused delays in other states.

Paul Simshauser, the CEO of state transmission company Powerlink, says it has taken just 3.5 years to get three renewable energy zones from whiteboard to energisation. “They are faster and smaller, and cheap to connect in to,” he told the CEC’s Solar and Storage conference on Wednesday morning.

De Brenni says the government – due to release its budget next week – is about to announce a series of “priority transmission investments” that he says will be rolled out “at a scale and a pace that has never been done anywhere in the country.”

The state is heading towards an election in October, with the federal Opposition currently leading in the polls. It signed up to the Labor government’s emissions reduction targets, but not to its renewable energy targets. Its MPs have said they want to keep burning coal in the state owned coal generators, although it seems cool on nuclear.

“The choice is actually quite stark in Queensland, to vote against renewable energy targets, to vote against … all of those frameworks actually enable a successful transition is something that I think everybody in this room needs to tell people about,” de Brenni said.

“There will be a moratorium on new renewable energy developments in Queensland. They will talk about nuclear but it will just be distraction so that they can continue to burn coal. So Queenslanders had this incredibly important choice to make later this year.”