Look it up yourself.
Posted on 09/11/2019 12:34:07 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
If you follow the debate over renewable energy, fossil fuels and nuclear, you probably know the biggest selling point that proponents of solar and wind preach about. It’s clean. Wind power, in particular, pushes the fact that nothing gets burned, no carbon is generated… it’s just giant, beautiful turbine blades spinning in the breeze and cranking out electricity for the masses.
But is it true? Well… mostly. But it turns out there’s one significant exception to that rule. Those giant turbine blades break or wear out over time and then they have to be replaced. And there’s almost nothing useful to be done with them so most wind up in landfills. (NPR)
While most of a turbine can be recycled or find a second life on another wind farm, researchers estimate the U.S. will have more than 720,000 tons of blade material to dispose of over the next 20 years, a figure that doesn’t include newer, taller, higher-capacity versions.
There aren’t many options to recycle or trash blades, and what options there are is expensive, partly because the U.S. wind industry is so young. It’s a waste problem that runs counter to what the industry is held up to be: a perfect solution for environmentalists looking to combat climate change, an attractive investment for companies such as Budweiser and Hormel Foods, and a job creator across the Midwest and Great Plains.
720,000 tons of turbine blades is a lot of material to dispose of. And because they have to be lightweight, yet strong, they’re made of a rather nasty combination of resins and fiberglass. Oh, and they’re still very heavy. And big. The blades range from 100 to 300 feet in length. Moving them requires special trucks and equipment to lift, load and unload them. That gets expensive pretty quickly.
Then there’s the problem of what to do with them. Since most wind farms are put out in rural areas, the township or county may have only a single landfill in operation, and generally not a large one. They don’t want their entire landfill taken up with a pile of these gigantic blades. Most utilities wind up having to cut the blades down to a more manageable size using special equipment. That adds more cost to the process and generates more resin and fiberglass dust.
NPR interviewed one guy in Texas who has started a company aiming to recycle the blades as much as possible. But that requires stripping all the resin off and then grinding them down into pellets that can then be used to make things like decking material. But the technology is still in its developmental stages and that’s an expensive process when all you’re producing is basically fiberglass pellets.
Is this enough to sink the wind energy industry? Certainly not. But it’s something for investors to consider and an issue that the industry will have to find a way to deal with going forward. And it’s also a good reminder that whenever someone tells you they’ve found a “clean” way to produce energy, be sure to look closely. No business is ever as clean as they make it out to be.
“The tour came as additional details have come to light regarding another advanced fusion reactor program at Lockheed Martin, which recently obtained a patent for portions of its own design.”
Fusion reactors will blow all these other power generation sources away.
Ah, so you’re only concerned about certain kinds of birds.
Giant UGLY turbine blades. These things are visual pollution as well as bird Cuisinarts.
Balderdash. Anything can be recycled. Wind turbine blades are just big....the component elements are just plastic and glass fiber. The plastic will burn just fine, and the glass fiber residue will landfill easily. Bigbob's post has it right. Fiberglass is fiberglass, whether it is wind turbine blades or boat hulls. Any engineer can design a facility to reduce either to small chips that can then either be burned or recycled.
Maybe in 100 years or so. I've been following fission and fusion plant designs since my nuke engineering classes back in the 1970's. No fusion designs have been anything other than full employment programs for physicists. Fission stands a good chance, especially molten salt, if we can just get the legal barriers removed.
You are wrong.
Wind turbines kill millions of bats each year...something windows do not do.
Wind turbines kill insects, like bees and may be related to the declining bee populations.
Insects sticking to the blades make them inefficient, requiring cleaning....just like solar panels.
These boondoggles are not commercially viable. Only idiots want to force them on is.
A wind farm near Albert Lea, Minn., brought more than 100 wind turbine blades measuring 120 ft long to be dumped in a Sioux Falls, South Dakota, landfill, but there’s a problem: the massive blades are taking up too much room ..
South Dakota is a long way to travel to dispose of wind turbine blades, which uses a lot of diesel fuel, and ..
Is there no engineer in Minnesota who can design a facility to recycled this mess ?
Most of it can and should be recycled and reused. Jimmy Carter (blast his eyes) forbid doing so by executive order; no President since then has had the guts to rescind his order.
Practical fusion reactors are about 20 years in the future.
That's what I was told as a physics grad student.
In 1986.
Could we stand up the old props close together to make a wall on the border?
Not to mention that the fiberglass resins used in windmills are extremely nasty chemical in origin.
“Glass windows and cats kill hundreds of times more birds than windmills.”
Don’t think so.
I doubt if China will take that long. They are heavily invested in it since the first country to achieve it will be years ahead of the rest of the world.
>>Most of it can and should be recycled and reused. Jimmy Carter (blast his eyes) forbid doing so by executive order; no President since then has had the guts to rescind his order.
Reagan rescinded Carter’s order. But the damage had already been done when the industry was forced to switch to containment facilities.
“According to the South China Morning Post, China’s Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) was able to sustain 90 million Fahrenheit plasma (50 million Kelvin) for 102 seconds. For context, the center of the sun is thought to be only about a third as hot.”
Wow.. a whole 120 seconds. The hot physics boys are still barking up a stupid tree. Read up on SAFIRE. FAR more interesting, and likely to succeed that any Tokamak.
What is needed is a central facility specifically designed for this purpose, with easy access to rail transport that can serve multiple states. The disposal of fissionable waste can serve as a good model of how to do it, without the objectionability of radioactivity.
Look it up yourself.
Heck, a twenty year life for windmills is very optimistic!
There are no subsidies for maintenance and scrapping: I will be surprised if 12-15 years is ever exceeded. 10-12 most likely.
“Same with solar panels, what happens to those solar farms when they wear out.”
Not a problem - by then they would have ‘served their purpose’ and allowed the Leftists to dismantle our fossil fuel plants by then.
As to the panels themselves, they’ll be put on a barge and sent to Asia, just like virtually everything else smug Americans throw into ‘recycle’ bins. Once in Asia, they’re either burned or dumped in the ground - either way, nice source of income for them.
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