What Happens To All The Old Wind Turbines?
February 8th, 2020Via: BBC:
Between last September and this March, it will become the final resting place for 1,000 fibreglass turbine blades.
These blades, which have reached the end of their 25-year working lives, come from three wind farms in the north-western US state. Each is about 90m (300ft) long, and will be cut into three, then the pieces will be stacked and buried.
Turbines from the first great 1990s wave of wind power are reaching the end of their life expectancy today. About two gigawatts worth of turbines will be refitted in 2019 and 2020. And disposing of them in an environmentally-friendly way is a growing problem.
Burying them doesn’t sound very green. Can they not be recycled?
Yeah, recycling the damn things is problematic. Clicking through to the article – if fabricating the pellets were at least break-even, it would be done for the optics alone. Amusement parks, sure, maybe a dozen.
The article states the blades are ~90 meter. From the location and of course older technology, these are no doubt 90 meter rotors; the blades roughly half (blade x two plus hub = rotor diameter). But that’s still huge and a big issue – currently an unresolved issue.
Seems to me they could be re-purposed as structural elements or similar for creative architects and building projects, sold on for a modest price, in lieu of spending large sums disposing of them. It’s not like the things have a half-life.