The requirement to move away from fossil fuels has never been more critical. Volatile global pricing, coupled with an urgent need to deliver green and sustainable energy solutions, presents vast opportunities for the renewables market. In turn, this creates an on-going carbon fibre supply challenge for manufacturers. The choice of carbon fibre and/or glass fibre usage in spar cap manufacture also remains crucial in terms of scalability and performance for today and tomorrow’s turbines. In this presentation, we address the strategic challenges that OEMs face to grow their production and the size of blades, whilst mitigating fibre shortages. We also present the global carbon fibre supply and demand forecast for the wind sector in detail and propose practical solutions for the industry to adopt to overcome this barrier.
