Snopes dealt with the question of whether windmill blades were buried in a landfill in Casper, Wyoming. Snopes said, “It is true that there is a landfill in Casper, Wyoming, that does accept decommissioned and damaged wind turbine blades and motors, both of which are not recyclable. However, it is important to highlight that up to 90% of a wind turbine is recyclable. That one-tenth of a windmill is not recyclable does not necessarily negate its overall green energy production over the course of its 20- to 25-year lifetime.”
Snopes has a way of twisting reality.
The blades have to be buried at the end of their lifespan. There is no alternative.
Wind turbine blades can’t be recycled and are piling up in landfills. There are only a few landfills in the country that accept decommissioned blades.
According to Bloomberg, companies are searching for ways to deal with the tens of thousands of blades that have reached the end of their lives.
A wind turbine’s blades can be longer than a Boeing 747 wing, so at the end of their lifespan, they can’t just be hauled away. First, you need to saw through the lissome fiberglass using a diamond-encrusted industrial saw to create three pieces small enough to be strapped to a tractor-trailer.
The municipal landfill in Casper, Wyoming, is the final resting place of 870 blades whose days making renewable energy have come to an end. The severed fragments look like bleached whale bones, says Bloomberg writer Chris Martin.
Currently, there are no plans to dispose of the plates in an environmentally friendly way.
The current process for getting rid of these blades is to pile them up and cover them with dirt like a mass grave.
Tossing these massive 120-foot pieces of fiberglass is incredibly wasteful and antithetical to the green aspect of this energy source.
The Casper regional landfill will accept 1000 of these blades, and then they’ll shut it down.
Each turbine blade needs between 30 and 44.8 ft. of landfill space. They run out of space fairly quickly. And there are no plans to deal with the problem of disposal.
You have to bury them and will soon run out of blade burial grounds.
thats a pantload put em through a shredder its plastic and can be used as construction material
There is no way to dispose of radioactive waste or toxic fly ash from burning coal.
Fly ash is used in concrete. Disposal of radioactive waste starts with reprocessing to get the fissile material left for inclusion in fuel elements. What is left will fill a very small volume and incasing it in vitrified materials renders it safe.
Do the math, They cost $4,000,000/widndmill. At best they generate $100,000/year of electricity. So at 25 years, they still cost more than $1.5 million more than they generated. What a waste of our money!!
Do the math or rely on world-renown financiers and energy researchers like Lazard, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, and Lawrence Berkeley Labs to do it for you. Wind power is cheaper than fossil fuels or nuclear energy. So is solar PV.
I wouldn’t trust your references to get a passing grade on a fifth grade arithmetic test.
That “analysis” completely ignores the cost of the required 100% backup by conventional energy, because they only produce power 20-25% of the time. It’s like saying you can save lots of money by buying a car that only works 20% of the time without considering the cost of the other car that actually works 100% of the time. LOL
No it isn’t, Jack. You should wake up. Really. The world is going back to fossile fuels. From Sweden to Germany the game is up. China never went stupid. Coal plants being ordered left and right. Nuclear plants being built.
Without massive subsides there would be very few wind farms or solar farms. They just don’t make economic or technical sense. Don’t even go to EVs. What a total joke. You have just about reached peak stupid on EVs. Ford loses tens of thousand of dollars on everyone they build. Chev loses. EV companies going under. You want something so bad it hurts. But what you want does not exist. You live in terror, or the future but you have no solution.
Your dream is based on massive subsidies and a people willing to have their energy turned off when needed.
But your reality is what you do to all those poor little black kids who spend their short lived getting lithium and cobalt and other minerals for you to feel good. You feel so very good, as they die needless deaths for pennies a day. You turn away and ignore all the suffering.
You remind me of that idiot who wrote “Silent Spring.” Ohhhhh so very pure of heart. Except for the 2 million or so children that die every year from increased malaria. So pure, so clean, so murderous. yes yes, doesn’t happen does it? CNN told you that. All those graves of those African kids are just empty.
Those “world renowned” don’t mind twisting the figures to get the answers they want. After all the costs are included, so-called green energy is not cheaper, nor is it cleaner.
As always, the enviro-nuts ignore the ugly truths about so-called “green” energy. When I taught middle school science, our textbooks would give the rosy side of going green. I felt it my duty to inform my students about the ugly side of the life-cycle analysis, which includes the costs and risks of disposal. During my research, I found a story about a company in Europe that repurposed old turbine blades into playground equipment. Fine. Just how many playgrounds are we going to need? Another article was on a guy from the US who started a company that turned the turbine blades into fiberglass pellets. At the time of printing, he wasn’t sure if there was even a market for these pellets, much less whether or not he could turn a profit from it. I kept searching for articles on recycling fiberglass for the next six years until I retired, and the only relevant hit was always this same article that had never been updated. However, I WAS able to find plenty of photos of chopped up blades sitting in the desert, just waiting to be buried.
What is your opinion of acidic, toxic radioactive tailings from uranium mining being used to pave roads and children’s playground on indigeneous peoples’ territories, middle school science teacher? How about your opinion on fly ash lagoons?
After reading some of your comments, my feeling is that you aren’t smart enough to pass my 6th grade class.
Launch the old blades into low orbit. They’ll burn up on re-entry. It should only cost a couple billion per blade. Problem solved. Biden style.
nah, they should do the same thing you’re supposed to do with old car batteries. go down to the beach and throw them into the ocean.
Maybe they could pack them full of old Li batteries first? They could be used as electric power poles, building columns, culverts or communications towers?
The first option would require precautions to keep the metals and their compounds from seeping into the water table. That’s why you’re not supposed to throw Li batteries in the regular trash. For the second, I think it’s logical to assume the blades are being replaced because they are no longer structurally sound. If they were, why replace them?
One thing I have noticed is that plastic fan blades in household fans start moving less and less air as they age. The blades flatten over time causing the problem. You get the same problem with wind turbine blades. They simply become less efficient and you have to replace them because they simply don’t catch the air as they used to. They may be fine structurally, meaning they are safe to leave on the turbine, but they simply don’t function as they should.
just as bad as putting CORN in the gasoline… WTF.
We’re getting closer to practical fusion power. The big holdups in having cheap energy are the oil companies that keep buying up patents on alternative energy. Like the one for a cheap process to split water back into oxygen and hydrogen and then burn it as a fuel in cars. Which, by the way, results in less water as the only exhaust product.
Hearing this same BS since the 60s. It’s always the bad oil companies, which have made you life great.
The big holdup in cheap energy is the government.
There is no cheap way to split water, it is a chemistry fact.
Why do we tolerate libtards?
Every cockamamie scheme they come up with is bad for our country and ends up destroying our wealth and standard of living. Finish the wall and throw democrats over it. That’s to prevent other means of destruction because, like windmill blades, there’s not enough landfill space to bury all the America-hating democrats.
Don’t need to bury them, let the buzzards do their job.
Throw politicians into that pile too.
Cut the round parts of them into sections 10 to 12 feet long and let people have them to build sheds and storage areas out of them…
Give them to the major cities to be used as homeless shelters
Make artificial reefs out of them and create massive new fisheries. Fiberglass is inert so there is no environmental damage. just more marine habitat and bigger fisheries. Image a forest of upright blades hosting thousands of different marine organisms and enormous new areas for marine recreation.
the “law of unintended consequences”
again bites leftist greeny climate freaks in the arse,
snopes is a joke
BTW not to mention,
what to do with millions of solar panels
and millions EV batteries when they become even more useless
than they already are?
The most optimistic estimate I’ve seen for recycling solar panels is recovering 25 cents worth of material for every dollar spent on the process. So when the local landfill will take them for $2 a panel, gee, I wonder where they end up?
This is Communist-style top-down economic model by a government that has no skin in the game or even obvious expertise other than the biased opinion to confirm their own biases. No way a free ecomomy would choose either wind or solar excepting for remote locatons that don’t justify a power plant. It costs more in CO2 to manufacture than it will ever save in its lifetime. This is just more intervention in our lives by Big Government.
I am no fan of wind power (pun intended).
However, we basically bury all of our trash. There is no reason that wind turbine blades be any different.
The difference comes when you look at the fact that most landfills will eventually degrade into something that can be reclaimed. Most landfills also generate methane that can be captured and used. Looks like these blades will still be there pretty much intact 1000 years from now.
For sentimental reasons, are all the endangered birds that the turbine killed buried along with it?
A wind turbine will never generate enough energy to pay for what it cost to build, install, and maintain itself! Lose Lose! It takes fossil fuel to build them.
“Turbines require lubrication. On average, a 5-MW (megawatt) turbine holds 700 gallons of oil and hydraulic fluid; like car oil, these need replacing every nine to 16 months.” https://www.meer.com/en/65443-before-committing-billions-to-industrial-wind-turbines#:~:text=Turbines%20require%20lubrication.,every%20nine%20to%2016%20months.
These 3 blade wind turbines do not work, that is, they cannot generate energy over what it took to make them. The ones you see rotating slowly are driven by motors to get them going.
And, don’t forget, the blades are made using petroleum. But…the illusion is more important…
They also bury them in place or dump them in the ocean. They don’t all go to cute little landfills.
Wasn’t the wind turbines about protecting the environment? (sarc)
In Sweetwater Texas, opposite the graveyard, there is a very ugly graveyard of discarded wind generator blades. Folks in the city don’t care. They are not in their yard,, but it is bad as any industrial junkyard.
Old story. Covered a year ago….
And still very relevant
So John, are you saying if we ignore the truth long enough it will go away?
Can dump them in the ocean–maybe tie a democrat to each one.
You comment provided a needed dose of humour.
Are you from Canada?
Why don’t they run them through a crusher. They’re fiberglass.
Probably not eco-friendly; Tee Hee.
put them in new york city and philly and austin…you get the point
Not to mention that they’re an eyesore, kill thousands of birds on a regular basis, and require a vast amount of real estate dedicated to their operation.
Why can’t they shred or grind them before burial? If the did that at least the footprint would be a lot less. I hate these wind turbines.
Maybe it costs too much to grind them up.
Might even be a worse envirohazard.
I really don’t know.
Because fiberglass is very abrasive & would wear out any machine that was used. We tried that years ago with boat molds & other fiberglass parts. And then you still have useless, toxic garbage.
We should use them to build a wall along the border.
A capital idea!
Green Energy or whatever name it’s been given, is not ready for prime time. There is a niche for it, but it can not replace carbon fuel and the machines that use carbon fuel.
Maui is a perfect example. Sail boats and battery powered construction equipment will not rebuild Lahaina. There is no government tax scheme or wealth distribution program, that could deliver alternative energy construction equipment to Maui. Rebuilding without modern equipment would take decades. Ask any contractor, if they would give up their carbon fuel equipment and hire more people to save the planet. Spoiler alert, they would not.
Before the internal combustion engine, ICE, equestrian travel was the only way to go. Why did Americans give up the horse for the horseless carriage? There was no government program to wean Americans off horses. Horse feed and pastures were not taxed to get riders out of the saddle and behind the steering wheel. People went from the horse based transportation to ICE because the ICE was measurably better.
When Green Energy becomes affordable and adaptable, the change will happen.
lost on everyone commenting
behind the entire climate/green rabbithole boondoggle
is leftist globalist/CCP marxist effort at global control over YOU
follow the money and source the propaganda
it all leads in only one direction
the USA and Western Europe being drained
of manufacturing capability and wealth
single source “green energy” products
are mostly made in PRC..
go figure