Environmentalists have tumbled to the fact that wind power is anything but the ‘clean, green’ energy source its proponents claim it to be.
While the wind industry works overtime to bury a range of inconvenient facts, it’s actually burying millions of tons of toxic waste, among a list of other environmental sins.
Wind turbines don’t run on wind, they run on subsidies: cut the subsidies and once these things inevitably grind to a halt, they’ll never be replaced.
With an economic lifespan of something like 10-12 years (rather than the overblown 25 put forward by turbine makers and wind power outfits), over the next decade countries like Germany will be left with hundreds of thousands of 200-300 tonne ‘problems’ littering the landscape. With hundreds of turbines already kaput, Germans have already been smacked with the harsh and toxic reality of their government’s so-called ‘green’ obsession.
And they aren’t alone.
Iowa’s wind industry has been going for barely a decade and already wind power outfits are sending thousands of tonnes of toxic waste to landfill.
While the owners of the waste facilities concerned are worried about the enormous amount of space being taken up, those surrounding these tips ought to be more concerned about the toxic cocktail of chemicals that will eventually find their way into underground streams and, ultimately, their water supply.
Sioux Falls landfill tightens rules after Iowa dumps dozens of wind turbine blades
Iowa wind-farms 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 two wind-farms in northern Iowa, they’ve found the Sioux Falls Regional Sanitary Landfill to be a suitable facility to take its aged-out turbine blades.
This year, 101 turbine blades have been trucked to the city dump. But with each one spanning 120 feet long, that’s caused officials with the landfill and the Sioux Falls Public Works Department to study the long-term effect that type of refuse could have on the dump.
Public Works Director Mark Cotter couldn’t say why the Iowa wind-farms is choosing to truck its blades to Sioux Falls, whether it’s rates or regulatory climate. But he told the Argus Leader Tuesday the blades accepted to date have come in three pieces, but they still require a lot of labor to get them ready to be placed in the ground.
The out-of-region rate is $64 a ton, and a typical blade weighs between 14 and 19 tons.
That’s because a portion of each blade is hollow on the inside, requiring landfill crews to compact them by crushing them beneath the weight of 120,000-pound trucks.
Still, it’s a process that hasn’t proven cost effective, even though the out-of-region price for bringing waste to the landfill is nearly double what locals pay.
“We can’t take any more unless they process them before bringing them to us,” Cotter said. “We’re using too many resources unloading them, driving over them a couple times and working them into the ground.”
Wind energy companies considering Sioux Falls for their old blades will now be required to break them down into pieces no larger than three feet in length. Cotter said that can be done through a grinding or sheering process.
However, Cotter said a few blades accepted at the site to date have been set aside in order to be used in a pilot to determine feasibility for sheering blades on site, the impact on air space at the landfill and if pricing for accepting them should be changed.
“You have to do a certain amount of handling them to understand what your costs are so we can make those decisions,” he said.
Joe Sneve reckons turbine blades last “a decade or two”.
Wind turbine blade failure is one of the more common features of these wondrously ‘reliable’ things: Wind Turbine Terror: Spanish Home Hit by Flying Blade – Just 1 of 3,800 Blade ‘Fails’ Every Year
And it’s not uncommon for turbine blades to fail within months of coming into operation.
At AGL’s Hallett 1 (Brown Hill) wind farm, south of Jamestown, South Australia the blades on each and every one of its 45 Suzlon S88s failed within their first year of operation, requiring their wholesale replacement.
The 2.1 MW, Indian built turbines commenced operation in April 2008. Not long into their operation, stress fractures began appearing in the 44m long blades. Suzlon (aka Senvion aka RePower) claimed that there was a “design fault” and was forced by AGL to replace the blades on all 45 turbines, under warranty.
The photos below show the stubs from those blades outside Suzlon’s Jamestown workshop. The main bodies of the blades were ground up and mixed with concrete used in the bases of other turbines erected later (the plastics in the blade are highly toxic, and contain Bisphenol A, which is so dangerous to health that the European Union and Canada have banned it):
Turbine blade failures, including events where 10 tonne blades are thrown to the 4 winds (aka ‘component liberation’) are so common that we are able to finish this post with a graphic documentary, the captions are linked to the stories behind the pictures:
And, we’ll finish with the video that strikes fear into the hearts of those unfortunate enough to live within 2 kms of these things:
Terrifying, dangerous and pointless!
And, it must be comforting to know that the liberated components depicted above (along with 3,800 odd blade fails every year) were quietly dumped in landfills – like the one detailed above – to deliver their toxic cocktail into aquifers and water supplies for centuries to come.
Welcome to your wind powered future!
Source: Stop These Things
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The 10 largest coal producers and exporters in Indonesia:
