>"projects in 2011 would typically have assumed a 20 year operational life, but the industry has moved towards 35 years as a standard and some players now even expect that 40 years is achievable"

I wonder how does the real lifetime look like, especially in cold seas where the blades have to deal not with just salty water droplets hitting their tips at very high speeds, but ice too. I've seen a video few years ago that said the blade lifetime in reality is shockingly worse than the estimates due to delamination, composite deterioration etc. As a proof they showed videos taken from air showing large amount of those blades being buried in the soil by huge bulldozers that looked very tiny in comparison to the size of the mountain of blades they were burying. I'm really curious if they resolved the problem by now.