America’s aging wind power will survive Trump, but needs a lot of work

On Inauguration Day, President Donald Trump issued an executive order indefinitely halting permits for new onshore wind energy projects on federal land, as well as new leases for offshore wind farms in U.S. coastal waters. The action not only fulfilled Trump’s “no new windmills” campaign pledge, but struck yet another blow to the wind industry, which has been hit hard over the past few years by supply chain snags, price increases upending project economics, public opposition and political backlash against federal tax credits, especially those spurring the fledgling offshore wind sector.

Nonetheless, the nation’s well-established onshore wind industry, built out over several decades, is generating nearly 11% of America’s electricity, making it the largest source of renewable energy and at times last year exceeding coal-fired generation. On April 8, the fossil-fuels-friendly Trump administration took measures to bolster coal mining and power plants, but as the infrastructure driving wind energy ages, efforts to “repower” it are creating new business opportunities for the industry’s key players.

This repowering activity has emerged as a bright spot for the wind industry, giving a much-needed boost to market leaders GE Vernova, Vestas and Siemens Gamesa, a subsidiary of Munich-based Siemens Energy. Following several challenging years of lackluster performance — due in particular to setbacks in both onshore and offshore projects — all three companies reported revenue increases in 2024, and both GE Vernova and Siemens stock have moved higher.

GE Vernova, spun off from General Electric a year ago, led overall onshore wind installations in 2024, with 56% of the U.S. market, followed by Denmark’s Vestas (40%) and Siemens Gamesa (4%).

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, installed wind power generating capacity grew from 2.4 gigawatts (GW) in 2000 to 150.1 GW as of April 2024. Although the growth rate for launching new greenfield onshore wind farms has slowed over the last 10 years, the U.S. is still poised to surpass 160 GW of wind capacity in 2025, according to a new report from energy research firm Wood Mackenzie.

There currently are about 1,500 onshore wind farms — on which more than 75,600 turbines are spinning — across 45 states, led by Texas, Iowa, Oklahoma, Illinois and Kansas. Virtually all of the wind farms are located on private land, and many of the largest ones are owned and operated by major energy companies, including NextEra Energy, RWE Clean Energy, Pattern Energy, Clearway Energy, Xcel Energy and Berkshire Hathaway‘s MidAmerican Energy, which generates 59% of it renewable energy from wind, including 3,500 turbines operating across 38 wind projects in Iowa.

A growing number of the turbines are 20-plus years old and nearing the end of their lifecycle. So increasingly, operators have to decide whether to upgrade or replace aging turbines’ key components, such as blades, rotors and electronics, or dismantle them altogether and erect new, technologically advanced and far more efficient models that can increase electricity output by up to 50%.

“What’s becoming clear is that more and more of the U.S. installed base [of onshore turbines] has exceeded its operational design life,” said Charles Coppins, research analyst for global wind at Wood Mackenzie, “and now operators are looking to replace those aging turbines with the latest [ones].”

To date, approximately 70 GW of onshore wind capacity has been fully repowered in the U.S., according to Wood Mackenzie, while an additional 12 GW has been partially repowered. The firm estimates that around 10,000 turbines have been decommissioned and that another 6,000 will be retired in the next 10 years, Coppins said.

Beyond the fact that aged-out turbines need to be upgraded or replaced, repowering an existing wind farm versus building a new site presents economic benefits to operators and OEMs. To begin with, there’s no need to acquire property. In fact, in certain situations, because today’s turbines are larger and more efficient, fewer turbines are needed. And they’ll generate additional electricity and have longer lifecycles, ultimately delivering higher output at a lower cost.

Even so, “there are some limitations on how much capacity you could increase a project by without having to go through new permitting processes or interconnection queues” to the power grid, said Stephen Maldonado, Wood Mackenzie’s U.S. onshore analyst. As long as the operator is not surpassing the allowed interconnection volume agreed to with the local utility, they can add electricity to the project and still send it to the grid.

Public opposition, Maldonado said, may be another hurdle to get over. Whether it’s a new or repower wind project, residents have expressed concerns about environmental hazards, decreased property values, aesthetics and general anti-renewables sentiment.

RWE, a subsidiary of Germany’s RWE Group, is the third largest renewable energy company in the U.S., owning and operating 41 utility-scale wind farms, according to its CEO Andrew Flanagan, making up 48% of its total installed operating portfolio and generating capacity, which also includes solar and battery storage.

One of RWE’s two repower projects underway (both are in Texas), is its Forest Creek wind farm, originally commissioned in 2006 and featuring 54 Siemens Gamesa turbines. The project will replace them with 45 new GE Vernova turbines that will extend the wind farm’s life by another 30 years once it goes back online later this year. Simultaneously, RWE and GE Vernova are partnering on a new wind farm, immediately adjacent to Forest Creek, adding another 64 turbines to the complex. When complete, RWE will deliver a total of 308 MW of wind energy to the region’s homes and businesses.

Flanagan noted that the combined projects are related to increased electricity demands from the area’s oil and gas production. “It’s great to see our wind generation drive the all-of-the-above energy approach,” he said. What’s more, at its peak, the repower project alone will employ 250 construction workers and over its operating period bring in $30 million in local tax revenue, he added.

In turn, the twin projects will support advanced manufacturing jobs at GE Vernova’s Pensacola, Florida, facility, as well as advancing the OEM’s repower business. In January, the company announced that in 2024 it received orders to repower more than 1 GW of wind turbines in the U.S.

Siemens Gamesa has executed several large U.S. repowering projects, notably MidAmerican’s expansive Rolling Hills wind farm in Iowa, which went online in 2011. In 2019, the company replaced 193 older turbines with 163 higher-capacity models produced at its manufacturing plants in Iowa and Kansas.

Last year, Siemens Gamesa began repowering RWE’s 17-year-old Champion Wind, a 127-MW wind farm in West Texas. The company is upgrading 41 of its turbines with new blades and nacelles (the housing at the top of the tower containing critical electrical components) and adding six new turbines.

In early April, Clearway announced an agreement with Vestas to repower its Mount Storm Wind farm in Grant County, West Virginia. The project will include removing the site’s 132 existing turbines and replacing them with 78 new models. The repower will result in an 85% increase in Mount Storm’s overall electricity generation while using 40% fewer turbines.

Preparing for ‘megatons’ of turbine recycling and tariffs

Another benefit of repowering is invigorating the nascent industry that’s recycling megatons of components from decommissioned turbines, including blades, steel, copper and aluminum. Most of today’s operational turbines are 85% to 95% recyclable, and OEMs are designing 100% recyclable models.

While the majority of mothballed blades, made from fiberglass and carbon fiber, have historically ended up in landfills, several startups have developed technologies recycle them. Carbon Rivers, for example, contracts with the turbine OEMs and wind farm operators to recover glass fiber, carbon fiber and resin systems from decommissioned blades to produce new composites and resins used for next-generation turbine blades, marine vessels, composite concrete and auto parts.

Veolia North America, a subsidiary of the French company Veolia Group, reconstitutes shredded blades and other composite materials into a fuel it then sells to cement manufacturers as a replacement for coal, sand and clay. Veolia has processed approximately 6,500 wind blades at a facility in Missouri, and expanded its processing capabilities to meet demand, according to David Araujo, Veolia’s general manager of engineered fuels.

Trump’s new-project moratorium isn’t his only impediment to the wind industry. The president’s seesaw of import tariffs, especially the 25% levy on steel and aluminum, is impacting U.S. manufacturers across most sectors.

The onshore wind industry, however, “has done a really good job of reducing geopolitical risks,” said John Hensley, senior vice president for markets and policy analysis at the American Clean Power Association, a trade group representing the clean energy industry. He cited a manufacturing base in the U.S. that includes hundreds of plants producing parts and components for turbines. Although some materials are imported, the investment in domestic manufacturing “provides some risk mitigation to these tariffs,” he said.

Amidst the headwinds, the onshore wind industry is trying to stay focused on the role that repowering can play in meeting the nation’s exponentially growing demand for electricity. “We’re expecting a 35% to 50% increase between now and 2040, which is just incredible,” Hensley said. “It’s like adding a new Louisiana to the grid every year for 15 years.”

GE Vernova CEO Scott Strazik recently told CNBC’s Jim Cramer that the growth of the U.S.’s electric load is the largest since the industrial boom that followed the end of the second world war. “You’ve got to go back to 1945 and the end of World War II, that’s the infrastructure buildout that we’re going to have,” he said. 

As OEMs and wind farm developers continue to face rising capital costs for new projects, as well as a Trump administration averse to clean energy industries, “repowering offers a pathway for delivering more electrons to the grid in a way that sidesteps or at least minimizes some of the challenges associated with all these issues,” Hensley said.