What happens to decommissioned wind turbines and blades? Some are finding new life as buildings.
Europe is on track for a record wind year, with 8.8 GW of new capacity installed in the first half of 2026 – a 30 per cent jump year on year.
That’s enough electricity to power around seven million European households and replace fossil fuel imports equivalent to 25 LNG tankers a year, according to industry nonprofit WindEurope.
But every turbine that goes up eventually means one coming down – and manufacturers are still working out how to make sure none of the materials go to waste.
This needs to say tiny SECOND homes. These are temporary vacation toys for the wealthy, not primary dwellings for anyone.
Between gentrification, the takeover of thrift stores and things like this - we can’t even repurpose garbage to benefit the less fortunate. Everything is an “endless record profits” engine.
I’m a big fan of this idea.
Haha!
I’m a big fan of big fans too!
Welcome to the fan fan club!
Fan fans are fanning out to fan fan, and fandom in general, fanaticism.
This sounds like cargo container housing all over again.
You make it sound like container housing was a fad. Container housing is on the rise.
The problem in most places is not the type of house, but getting somewhere to actually build the housing. In the UK any potential site is bought by big developers who put as many houses as possible in a small space to maximise profits
Could you stick one in the garden and just live in it as another bedroom? Or partially bury it and pile the earth up on top of it so you have a hobbit hole.
Would love to try something like that but my garden is a bit small.
I want to live in an Earth bermed shipping container more than I want a lot of things.
Isn’t that the point of a tiny home? That you can have a lot of them in a given space?
It’s so absurd; it’s more expensive to convert a container into a home than to just build the home on site
But they’re at least much larger and better built - all the “new” containers you can buy in the use are built as one trip containers in China - sure they seem in good condition, but their longevity is suspect.
Steel is a stupid and wasteful application to make housing.
I’d get motion sick.
Nice 360° view though.
Glamping, maybe. Clearly not houses.
Four metres wide, 10 metres long and three metres high,
this one is larger (by about 25%, and excluding the also higher ceiling) than my walk-up apartment.
It’s a touch larger than my apartment, too, and with no upstairs neighbors…
Larger than my apartment as well. My place is an ADU (additional dwelling unit). It was previously a garage.
A nice, long house like that is begging to be turned into a passive-solar house.
This is about the same size as the liveable area of my house. Slightly larger, I think.
I lived semi-comfortably for over a year in a 29m² apartament with my spouse and our small child. I see no reason why 40m² couldn’t be a permanent solution for singles and child-free couples. Depending on structural durability (can they be stacked? Maybe if we add a steel frame?) we could build apartament complexes which would further extend the user pool. You don’t need a lot of space inside the house if you have a well stocked library and community workshop around the corner. Add some playgrounds and you can house young families. Heck, join two modules together and you got space enough for a 2+2 family for a lifetime.
The only real problems I see is we don’t know the energy efficiency of the unit and how the cost compares to traditional building methods. If it isn’t much cheaper the downsides (fixed size, lack of steady supply etc.) will kill it.
60m² and our house was originally 3 bedrooms. High ceiling also means you can store stuff vertically more, get some tall shelves.
I’d rather have had that when I was living out of my car.
There seems to be a big market for tiny homes among older single people especially women. Like containers, there should be no problem in linking a couple or pods to create a bigger space.
Perfect for housing the homeless. Better than no home.
Fiberglassmping?
An interesting guest house if nothing else though if want to set up plumbing
It’s the perfect guest house. Separate from the main house and not comfortable for long term visits.
Cool, but why can’t the housings be reused for replacement turbines?
By the time one of these housings is getting phased out, the turbine design is years or decades out of date. The internal components are all going to be different. The exterior of the housing is also part of the airflow design.
Considering the amount of torque being applied to the components in the housing by the rotor, it probably wouldn’t be safe to drill new mounting holes in an old housing to fit a new generator &etc.
The blades aren’t worth much, you can probably just shred it and turn it into fiberglass insulation.
fiberglass insulation works because of 2 things, glass’ low thermal conductivity, but especially because all the air trapped between all the thin strands. Shredding these would create a mainly compact granulate/dust, and a shit ton of microplastics.
Yeah fiberglass insulation is loose strands. Fiberglass as a building material is woven into fabric, then rigidized with epoxy. You can’t turn it back into strands.
Yeah, you would probably have to reprocess it or use it as a some lower quality filler.
Nakagin Capsule Tower, thou art avenged
Get George Clarke to do one of these
