Wind Farm Blades: Oh the Irony

Wait just a second :

Englund believes he's found a way to recycle blades by grinding them up to make chocolate chip-sized pellets. They can be used for decking materials, pallets and piping. His startup opened its first processing facility in central Texas this year, and it's leasing a second space near Des Moines, Iowa.​

 

Those spinners are indeed large and appear to comprise a substantial fraction of global fiberglass

Fiberglass Market worth US$10.8 Billion by 2025

Details available there for <$USD 6000

Is this the recycling company mentioned above?

Fiberglass Recycling | Global Fiberglass Solutions

 

I read that piece too.

You know what? we can stack up windmill blades for another 100 years or so before it begins to look like any of our boat junkyards.

Heck, we can keep it up for a couple thousand years before it presents a threat to living organisms like a dam, a reactor or a furnace. It would just be a hill of fiberglass parts; no more and no less.

As lousy as it is that we can't recondition and re-use them, it's really not a big deal to have them sitting there sort of broken. The world literally is big enough to support junkyards of iffy windmill blades while we use fresh ones to harvest the wind to power kitten GIFs, tattoo needles and rice cookers.

 

If they were smooth on the inside, could be repurposed as waterpark slides. Just spitballin' here.

 

I don't see why they couldn't be used as stator blades for a different sort of wind park. We just haven't had imaginative enough CFD work to figure out the right rotor/generator to accompany them. You present a challenge to the wind and work will be done. You ask the right question of it and you get some energy without cost.

 

When this last came up in the news, I posted an article about an easy to recycle resin for the blades had been developed in the lab.

Think I saw a headline about them being repurposed for playgrounds.

 

Seems like you could cut and make small fiberglass parts out of those large ones.
Roofing tiles, small body panels, etc.

just takes someone to push through red tape to do it

 

"This research suggests that not only will wind farms require more land to hit the proposed renewable energy targets but also, at such a large scale, would become an active player in the climate system.
The next question, as explored in the journal Joule, was how such large-scale wind farms would impact the climate system.
To estimate the impacts of wind power, Keith and Miller established a baseline for the 2012‒2014 U.S. climate using a standard weather-forecasting model. Then, they covered one-third of the continental U.S. with enough wind turbines to meet present-day U.S. electricity demand. The researchers found this scenario would warm the surface temperature of the continental U.S. by 0.24 degrees Celsius, with the largest changes occurring at night when surface temperatures increased by up to 1.5 degrees. This warming is the result of wind turbines actively mixing the atmosphere near the ground and aloft while simultaneously extracting from the atmosphere’s motion."

quotes from this article
Wind Farms Cause More Environmental Impact Than Previously Thought

article on impact to birds
U.S. Fish &amp; Wildlife Service - Migratory Bird Program | Conserving America's Birds
"The most comprehensive and statistically sound estimates show that bird deaths from turbine collisions are between 140,000 and 500,000 birds per year. As wind energy capacity increases under the DOE’s mandate (a six-fold increase from current levels), statistical models predict that mean bird deaths resulting in collisions with turbines could reach 1.4 million birds/year."

Wind energy has a very large impact on climate and wildlife - in energy you do not get something for nothing!

 

If they aren't leaching anything, I see no reason why they couldn't be buried in landfills, or still better used in remediation of open mines.

 

They've still got some structural utility. They just aren't rated for swinging around in the air anymore.

Covered bike trails or sidewalks maybe?

 

Are they next to the landfills full of Prius batteries?

I'll bring my shovel.

Bob Wilson

 

Solid fiberglass is R1+ per inch and those turbines are about a foot thick, translucent to light and as strong as steel.

they would make excellent home building materials in a pilon style.

too bad individuals aren’t allowed any freedom in the appearance of their home

I would live in a round white fort of turbines, stack them doubled up to provide a ledge for a floor and voila bulletproof and tornado proof eco structure

 

For comparison, here are some U.S. annual bird death estimates I'm seeing from other causes:

500,000 to 1 million from oil pits;

8 to 57 million from collisions with electric utility lines;

365 to 988 million from crashing into windows;

1.3 to 4 billion from cats.

Veracity of each of this estimates is unknown. Different sources list the #1 cause of bird mortality here as either cats or disease.

The above are just wild birds. USDA reports on annual chicken slaughter for consumption are about 9 billion per year.

 

Fully agreed, but this still looks like a better deal than almost anything else.

We've banked up a heck of a lot of heat energy in the atmosphere & ocean. I sure wouldn't mind if we bled some off gently instead of letting it go violently when it feels like it.

 

These articles reminded me of a custom home show where the home used an old jet liner wing for the main roof.

Of course, it's on the Wiki.
747 Wing House - Wikipedia


Edit: I'm guessing these, and any turbine blades that happen to make their way into construction, need to be well 'anchored' against the wind.

 

Indeed! This alleged terrible environmental catastrophe is after having generated multiple Gigawatt-years of clean energy!

I haven’t crunched the numbers to back this up, but I bet this a minuscule price to pay compared to pollution from burning petroleum-based products, let alone the likes of the Deepwater Horizon spill.

This is a lot like complaints that Lithium mining destroys the environment worse than burning gasoline in cars. The problem with that argument is that even a Tesla Model S P100D, with its *monster* battery only contains around 120lb of Lithium. That is all of the lithium that car will ever involve in its entire 15ish-year lifespan (after which it will be reused for another 10ish years in stationary power applications).

Meanwhile, a comparable-sized pure-gasoline car will burn somewhere around 8000 gallons of gasoline over a 160Kmile life span.

That lithium is a one-time expense, that enables an 85ish% efficient drive train — on the order of 3-4 times the efficiency of a medium-large pure-gasoline-car drive train.

Similarly, those wind-turbine blades were a one-time expense allowing untold numbers of GWh of clean energy energy to be generated. After such a huge benefit, those pieces of fiberglass are squiddly-dot damage to the environment!

 

Terrible title. The article even contradicts itself by noting a company that is actually recycling turbine blades.

The main issue appears to be the size of the blades being too big for traditional recycling equipment, which is a simple problem to solve provided there is enough volume of material to make recycling worthwhile. The trouble in the U.S. is that we have plentiful amounts of cheap land, so cities/companies prefer to dump them in landfills instead.