Posted on 09/05/2019 7:36:28 AM PDT by Hojczyk
Wind turbines only last for around 20 years, so many of them are now wearing out. That raises serious questions about disposal of defunct wind turbine parts. The turbines’ giant blades are not recyclable, so they must be dumped in landfills. The Sioux Falls Argus Leader reports on one South Dakota landfill that is saying no mas to wind turbine blades:
[T]he Argus Leader reports that more than 100 wind turbine blades measuring 120 ft long have been dumped in a Sioux Falls, South Dakota, landfill, but there’s a problem: the massive blades are taking up too much room, according to local City officials. …
A wind farm near Albert Lea, Minn., brought dozens of their old turbine blades to the Sioux Falls dump this summer.
But City Hall says it won’t take anymore unless owners take more steps to make the massive fiberglass pieces less space consuming.
The wind energy industry isn’t immune to cyclical replacement, with turbine blades needing to be replaced after a decade or two in use. That has wind energy producers looking for places to accept the blades on their turbines that need to be replaced.
For at least one wind-farm in south central Minnesota, it found the Sioux Falls Regional Sanitary Landfill to be a suitable facility to take its aged-out turbine blades.
(Excerpt) Read more at powerlineblog.com ...
What about that house size concrete block that holds the whole thing up ?
I guess ignorance is bliss
Doesn’t fiberglass burn?
I really don’t see a problem here.
Maybe we could modify some coal fired power plants, and those blades could make a last contribution to energy production via their death.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization
This process can return that fiberglass to being oil.
They had a difficult time making a profit since they made some basic mistakes in their business model.
But the process works and should be pursued for waste disposal.
You would think the greenies would push for it as it keeps so much “Waste” out of land-fill’s.
But nope, it produces evil FUEL OILS!
They seem to be the same way regarding Nuclear power. Fortunately, a lot of the “leaders” of this thinking are making a huge about face. I’ve watched several TED talks from different people who were nuclear haters and now love the idea. They actually looked at the output of nuclear and the safety stats and they changed their minds.
That’s a rare thing nowadays.
FIASCO.
Fiberglas is not really a “recyclable” substance, being very difficult to put into any kind of biodegradable reduction program.
It MIGHT be possible to mill the blades up into rather much smaller pieces, a process that would take a LOT of energy, as fiberglas is very tough, and does not break up easily.
It would still not be “biodegradable”, but perhaps it could be put through a “Plasma Arc Trash Reduction” which would destroy the resin compounds that bind the glass fibers together, and the silica component of the fibers would then form part of the slag that drops to the bottom of the retort chamber. The resin constituents would be converted into “syngas”, a combination of hydrogen and carbon monoxide, which could be used as fuel to drive the power generators necessary to supply the massive amounts of electricity need to both break up the wind vanes into small particles suitable for feeding into the plasma arc, and to maintain the plasma arc itself.
Again, the cost of this means of reducing the fiberglas vanes to more manageable form would have to be charged off to the real costs of using wind energy as a power source.
And since wind energy is unreliable at best, for every megawatt of generating capacity that is set up, at least the same amount of standby power, usually in the form of Natural gas-fired dynamos on reserve, has to be at the ready. These turbines have the advantage of being able to spool up and go online within SECONDS of increases in power demands, and also to cut out (comparatively) smoothly as the power demand drops.
Why not dispense with the wind power altogether, and rely on the natural gas-fired turbines to begin with? Cut out a lot of overhead right there.
Ship them to California
In the end, you and I completely agree on this.
I’m just having fun with it. :)
Are they fiberglass?? I thought they used carbon fiber. At any rate, yes, fiberglass "does" burn quite nicely, and the residue is nice safe SiO2 (i.e. sand). Carbon fiber would burn even better.
Solar Does work incredibly well however. Photovoltaics have no break down mechanism and it’s the only technology on planet earth that requires no moving parts
Yup. Along with other things. :-)
add two additional equivalent landfill spaces to hold all the dead birds
but libtards ‘feel good’ - its all that matters
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