Netherlands routes decommissioned wind turbines to Ukraine as reuse undercuts scrap
Reusing end-of-life Dutch turbines offers Ukraine cheap generation as new-turbine prices climb and its grid stays under Russian attack.
The Netherlands is sending decommissioned wind turbines to Ukraine instead of the scrapyard, handing worn-out hardware a second life in a country whose power grid remains under Russian attack.1
The reuse push lands as Kyiv scrambles to shore up a battered electricity system. Ukraine halted the transit of Russian gas to European customers on Wednesday (2026-05-13) after a prewar deal expired, closing a chapter in which Russia once supplied nearly 40% of the EU's pipeline gas before its share fell to about 8% in 2023, according to EU Commission data cited by NPR.3
The legislative groundwork for tighter integration is already in place. Ukraine's parliament adopted legislation late on Tuesday (2026-05-19) to align its electricity market with the EU, paving the way for market coupling with the bloc, Montel reported.1
Reuse looks attractive now partly because new turbines have become dear. Rystad Energy told Montel that offshore wind turbine selling prices had risen 40-45% since 2020, outpacing manufacturing cost increases of 20-25%, as thinning competition among suppliers drives up costs and threatens national buildout targets.2
The wider European push guarantees a steady stream of ageing machines. The EU has committed to roughly double its installed wind capacity by 2030, to about 425 gigawatts, while Britain's 50GW offshore target for the same year requires a quadrupling.4
As older fleets come down in repowering cycles, each turbine inspected rather than crushed becomes a candidate for export. A secondary market for decommissioned units, if it develops, would give scrap a purchase price instead of a disposal bill, and could ease some of the supplier bottleneck Rystad flagged.2
Refurbished turbines are a stopgap, not a fix. Ukraine's deeper problem is a power sector that will eventually need rebuilding, and second-hand machines slot in only where the grid can absorb them, a task made easier by the market-alignment law now on the books.1
There is a demand-side logic too. With Russian pipeline gas largely gone from the European balance and Ukraine no longer earning transit revenue, any domestic generation that keeps running through the winter substitutes for imported power at premium prices.3
The next test is Dutch repowering this autumn: whether decommissioned turbines feed a reuse pipeline or a scrapyard queue. With supplier competition thin and new-build prices up 40-45% since 2020, the economics favour keeping usable turbines in service somewhere, even second-hand and even intermittently.2