Circular Wind Foundations (CWF) develops certified, recoverable onshore wind-turbine foundations engineered for full removal and high-value material recovery at end of life. A modern onshore foundation contains 10 to 25 tonnes of steel and 500 to 1,000 m³ of concrete, between 1,200 and 2,400 tonnes of mass per turbine. Today, that mass is almost always left in the ground at decommissioning, despite regulations that require its removal. CWF will close this gap by making recoverability a baseline design condition, certified under DNV-SE-0160 and anchored in the UGA standards architecture.
Across Europe, more than 25,000 onshore turbines are expected to reach end of life by 2040. Their foundations represent roughly 1.6 million tonnes of stranded steel, tens of millions of cubic metres of stranded concrete, and an estimated €500 million in lost recoverable value. Decommissioning regulations require full removal in most jurisdictions, but conventional foundation designs make compliance physically and economically impractical. The cost of that gap currently falls on developers, landowners, and regulators – and grows with every additional installation.
Execution materials, modelling outputs, and certification pathway documentation are available upon request.
CWF is anchored in the UGA standards architecture, with the vertical chain UGA-0000125 → UGA-0000404 → UGA-0000404008 → UGA-00004040081 (onshore foundations) setting the bright-line rule that no concrete or steel may be left behind at decommissioning. The horizontal Clean-Loop family (UGA-0000313) governs material separation, recovery integrity, and verified recycling. Together, these constraints have been translated into structural design and certification requirements, with no room for derogation.
CWF is being independently certified by DNV, the global classification society whose standards underpin modern wind infrastructure. The Technology Qualification pathway gives developers, asset owners, and regulators a defensible basis for adopting recoverable foundations, anchored in established European and international engineering standards. Roll-out begins in the European Union and extends progressively into the United Kingdom, North America, and Asia-Pacific as deployment scales.
Design has converged on a precast segmented circular gravity slab with central tower-mount pier, joined by unbonded post-tensioning and dry shear keys, with an embedded geotextile separator at the soil interface. Driven monopile and hybrid modular configurations were evaluated and dropped from the v1 scope. The chosen architecture targets 90 to 98 per cent material recovery, with a modular decommissioning sequence (de-tension, lift segments, remove separator, regrade) that allows reuse of the bulk of the structure on a follow-on site.
The initiative is anchored in the UGA standards architecture under the System Resilience family (UGA-0000125). The structural sub-standard for circular onshore wind foundations, UGA-0000404008 with its onshore instance UGA-0004040081, sets the bright-line rule that no concrete or steel may be left behind at decommissioning. Five onshore protocols specify recovery and verification practice. Material handling is governed in parallel by the Clean-Loop family (UGA-0000313), with selected protocols applicable to material separation, recovery integrity, and recycling chain transparency.
Where relevant, the UGA standards align with established international standards covering wind turbine support-structure integrity, asset management, risk management, and environmental management. Active alignments include IEC 61400-6 (tower and foundation design), Eurocode 2 (concrete structures), Eurocode 7 (geotechnical design), EN 197 / EN 12620 / EN 1992 (cement and concrete material specifications), and the CPR/CE regulatory framework for construction products in the EU. Where novel materials such as geopolymer or ultra-high-performance concrete are introduced, the European Technical Assessment (ETA) route under an issued European Assessment Document (EAD) provides the formal compliance path.
End-of-life accountability in wind is uneven across Europe. Most jurisdictions impose a legal duty to dismantle and restore sites, but only some impose financial mechanisms that guarantee execution if the original operator is no longer available. CWF approaches the gap from the design side rather than the financial side: by making the foundation compliant with recovery requirements at the point of construction, accountability is built into the asset itself. The decommissioning sequence becomes a defined modular operation (de-tension, lift, separate, regrade), and recovery economics – approximately 90 to 95 per cent concrete recovery, 100 per cent steel recovery, under 5 per cent residual – make the operation viable rather than punitive.
CWF is structured as a commercial company with embedded impact value. The primary route to market is licensing, with a four-tier pricing structure: pilot deployments (€0 to €15k per foundation) for early certification partners, early-adopter licences (€20k to €35k) for first commercial roll-outs, standard licences (€50k to €75k) for general-market use, and premium licences (€75k and above) for high-throughput operators. At early-adopter pricing, recovery economics yield approximately €35k to €40k net saving per turbine, or €700k to €800k per 20-turbine farm, primarily driven by concrete recovery, with steel recovery as a secondary upside. Turnkey delivery and lifecycle services form the second and third revenue layers, completing a full commercial stack rather than a single-licence model.
Circular Wind Foundations sits within Circular Energy Infrastructure, the TG platform for circular energy initiatives. Within that wider context, CWF focuses specifically on recoverable onshore wind foundation systems and their certification, deployment, and end-of-life logic.
These publications place Circular Wind Foundations in a broader infrastructure context. They span onshore wind, hydro decommissioning, and systemic standards, and together they show the wider technical and standards logic shaping recoverable energy infrastructure.
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