EU wind turbine blade supply chain advocates urgent measures to strengthen EU resilience
31 May 2024CEFIC UP/VE, CEFIC Epoxy Europe, TECH-FAB Europe, Glass Fibre Europe, Rotorblatt Allianz and major core materials producers, representing industries in the wind turbine blade value chain, welcome the adoption of the EU Net-Zero Industry Act (‘NZIA') and the positive elements in it for the entire value chain. Yet, also consider that the objectives set in the NZIA urgently require additional meaningful and ambitious measures to foster EU production of key inputs in the production of wind turbine blades.
In this regard, upstream materials such as glass fibres and fabrics, resins and core materials, are strategic value chain components for net zero technologies. Upstream industries in the wind energy turbine blade value chain have made valuable and instrumental contributions to the production of wind turbines in the EU, including important innovations enabling for example the constant increase in the length of wind turbine blades, leading to an increase in power output.
While the associations support the urgent requests of a variety of EU manufacturing industries, expressed in the recent Antwerp Declaration, including the need to ensure access to secure, low carbon energy sources at reasonable and competitive prices, the wind turbine blade supply chain has additional specific needs.
To understand these additional specific needs, it is first necessary to recognize that the positive elements of the NZIA alone are not sufficient to ensure the resilience and scaling-up of the manufacturing capacity of these strategic value chain components. The EU market is currently facing challenges with EU manufacturers throughout the supply chain being substantially undercut by imports from third countries with immense subsidised overcapacities. This unbalanced situation needs to be addressed for the NZIA to start delivering its benefits, in particular to new “strategic projects” to start delivering.
Ambitious measures to strengthen EU resilience and advance NZIA goals
The associations specifically call for EU authorities to take steps that directly and substantially encourage sustainable and resilient supply chains, favouring less complexity along with a higher content of EU-produced critical inputs, and ensure a level-playing field on the EU market. Concretely, they call on the EU institutions to :
- Urgently adopt policies that favour local content and introduce specific requirements to increase wind turbine blade supply chain resilience (e.g. 70%).
- Be quick to investigate and impose needed trade defence measures on subsidised and dumped imports at each step of the wind turbine blade value chain.
- Expand and improve custom controls of imports, to prevent circumvention of trade defence measures, and to better enforce environmental, sustainability and social requirements for imports (including REACH, forced labor and other labor standards, anti-bribery, etc).
The full text of the position paper can be found here.
