Viabilidad de la reutilización de aerogeneradores en el noroeste español Feasibility of the reusing of wind turbines in northwest Spain

Wind energy is a renewable system of power generation with great potential to be used and it is a sector with good growth prospects. The development of new wind turbine models assumed that the lifetime of machines is constrained, as the power supplied by the turbine is considered small for the state of wind technology. This involves replacing obsolete turbines to adjust production of wind energy to a growing demand. However, these turbines which are considered obsolete still have good performance for reuse in areas with adequate energy demand. An opportunity to reuse these machines is the isolated rural areas which are typical in northwestern Spain. In this paper is studied the feasibility of obsolete wind turbines to meet the energy needs of isolated rural areas. The methods exposed were used to facilitate the decision making process. We studied the economic feasibility and the results demonstrated that it is a viable investment.