"Bidenville"
Posted on 10/26/2020 8:03:05 AM PDT by Diana in Wisconsin
In an epic case of poor foresight, the “clean, green” wind industry forgot to come up with a plan for what to do with wind turbine blades after they stop working.
Like all things, they get old and stop functioning properly after a while, but the plastic used to make them lasts virtually “forever.”
The industry has found ways to recycle the steel used to build the towers, but not the fiberglass (a type of plastic) used to build the blades of the high-tech windmills.
Now that the first generation of wind turbines has reached the end of their “lives,” tens of thousands of blades the size of Boeing 747 wings are coming down for burial in giant graveyards we call landfills (12,000 a year in the U.S. and Europe alone).
And that’s just a fraction of what’s to come. These dying turbines were built over a decade ago, “when installations were less than a fifth of what they are now,” Bloomberg reports.
That means there will be more than 5 times as many (hundreds of thousands) being retired over the next decade.
Because they are “built to withstand hurricane-force winds, the blades can’t easily be crushed, recycled or repurposed,” Bloomberg notes.
“That’s created an urgent search for alternatives in places that lack wide-open prairies.”
There are only a handful of landfills that accept them in the U.S. in Iowa and South Dakota.
After being cut into three pieces so they can fit on a truck, they are transported thousands of miles to these junk cemeteries and buried in stacks 30-feet deep.
“The wind turbine blade will be there, ultimately, forever,” Bob Cappadona of Veolia Environnement SA told Bloomberg. “Most landfills are considered a dry tomb.”
A Texas startup called Global Fiberglass Solutions has developed a method to break down blades and press them into pellets and fiber boards to be used for flooring and walls.
“We can process 99.9% of a blade and handle about 6,000 to 7,000 blades a year per plant,” said Chief Executive Officer Don Lilly. “When we start to sell to more builders, we can take in a lot more of them. We’re just gearing up.”
Until demand for the company’s product increases, the blades will continue to make the long haul to the landfills in cities that are paid up to $675,000 to store them indefinitely.
"Bidenville"
Thank you!
That was actually an extremely helpful response!
(what are you new here????)
And...just like when they were constructed, they need huge cranes to lower the blades down, and oversized trucks to transport them to the landfill. Where they need another large crane to take them off of the truck.
Fish Habitat
W MN and SD municipalities have been trying to ban using their dump sites for these blades.
Greenies don’t mind dumping non bio-degradable waste in the backyards of deplorables.
The liberals believe in only two kinds of power
—
Nope, the believe in three: Wind, solar, and biomass all of which they will need to cover the entire US to generate the power needed - your home, office building will have to be replaced with one of the 3.
It literally took me less than a minute to figure out how to “Recycle” them and end up with a useful end product.
Not as cheap as just dumping them, but recycling never is.
Where is my $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ check?
Send! not Wend! (Yes, Liberal Whinemills!)
Better then that...1st or 2nd yr engineering students could design real houses....when the material is “free” you have a cost advantage to begin with....
PS...I'm a huge fan of re-purposing things....
(That's why my wife doesn't let me do to the dump)
“How does a plastic blade ‘wear out’”
_____________
Stress fractures from the slight bending due to torque placed on the blade....
______________
If you take a look at the first two paragraphs in the ‘Introduction’ section of the Researchgate paper below, you’ll have a good explanation of the basic issues. The problem is fatigue due to cyclical loads. While there are many specific cyclical loads on an IWT blade that need to be analyzed, here’s one that is fairly straightforward to understand even for the non-engineers....
One of the most common areas of fatigue problems is at the root of a blade. Here’s what happens as a blade rotates and all you have to do is examine two locations.... When a blade going in a clockwise direction is at say the 9 o’clock position, gravity is acting down and the moment that is being applied at the root of a blade is in a counter clockwise direction due to the weight of the blade. Now rotate the blade 180 degrees so that it’s at the 3 o’clock position. At this location, gravity is still of course acting down but this time the moment due to the blade weight that is being applied at the root is in a clockwise direction. So... what happens at the root of a blade is that the stresses that are due just to the gravity portion of the loading have to alternate. A typical IWT has a rotation speed of approximately 16 times a minute. This then means that the cyclical load just due to gravity on a blade occurs that frequently.
And this is just one (and the simplest) of the cyclical forces acting on the blades and is just looking at two locations. If you look at the 12 o’clock and the 6 o’clock positions for the blades, you have something very similar.... the stresses at the root due to the weight of the blade are very different because of the rotational location and this changes with every revolution.
https://www.osti.gov/biblio/12694
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/314755353_FATIGUE_ANALYSIS_OF_WIND_TURBINE_BLADES
Yeah, plus the rebound, wind pressure, uneven tightening on the attachment bolt, the foundation being a tiny bit off level causing the blades to stress the spindle unevenly, small anomalies or defects in the carbon weave, tiny air bubbles in the resin or slightly uneven thickness of the resin can all cause stress fractures. And those things do not even take into account a defective design or square/sharp edges.
I don’t know much about windmill blades but I know some of the engineering that goes into bicycle frames and preventing stress fractures are a huge issue in the design and build process. I am assuming the issues are similar, just on a different scale.
Can’t they glue turbine blades out of the feathers of the chopped up birds?....
Probably roads could be made from it as well.
Thanks
:)
Bingo! We have a winner!
Ship them to sites where clean, nontoxic fill is needed to help level or build up the ground. Win-win.
The odor of burning plastic is unpleasant, so it'll have to be done away from and downwind of human habitation.
The solar panels on my roof are modern and fully recyclable with a 25 year guaranteed life span. They also contain zero cadmium, arsenic,lead, or mercury. Modern silicon thin flim cells do not contain any of those elements anymore. Germanium is used in some high-end cells but it’s value is so high no one in their right mind would land fill it at the prices to be had by recyclers for it. Most of the standard cells are PN cells. p-type semiconductor are boron, gallium, and indium. That is part of the silicon crystal structure and is incapable of being leached out by water action. N type silicon is made with formerly arsenic and now phosphorus in the crystalline structure both are in the ppt range relative to silicon neither can reach due to their bonding to the crystalline structure, both have 5 electron on their outer shell and both work equally well as N type. all modern N type silicon is phosphorus. High end n type uses Germanium over silicon due to it
s 32 v 14 electron holes per atom. But residential cells will almost never be Germanium cells those are reserved for satellites in orbit due to the cost to weight ratio.
Waste incinerators have multiple layers of exhaust scrubbers there would be no over after the exhaust is sent through particulate filters, acid gas scrubbers, organic vapor recovery units. Hong Kong and Singapore both incinerate nearly all of their municipal and industrial wastes due to land restrictions on land fills in the small island nations. There’s no smell nor any toxin released after proper scrubbing. They generate a good amount of steam and electricity via the process as well both sold to the grid as district heating and grid electricity.
Why don’t we just dump these blades in active volcanoes and then they are gone.
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