There are lots of amusing papers about trying to find different ways to do something with the turbine blades. Most are currently cut up and land filled. People are trying to find ways to burn them without emitting toxic fumes. They are apparently made with a type of fiberglass impregnated with a thermopolymer - the fuel source. It appears that the cheapest way to deal with them is to landfill them.
Here's a recent paper, 2020, on dealing with the problem in Ireland: A Comparative Life Cycle Assessment between landfilling and Co-Processing of waste from decommissioned Irish wind turbine blades (Leahy et al., Journal of Cleaner Production 277 (2020) 123321)
(Of course, if they fall into the ocean, all bets are off.)
The turbine blades last around 20 years, before they have to be pulled down, cut into pieces - I'm sure the dust is wonderful for peoples lungs - and hauled off to a dump, where they can leach stuff for, well, forever. Some have a kind of coating polymer that apparently shreds after three years; at sea, this increases the polymer load in seawater. When this coating shreds, it degrades the performance of these giant eyesores.
Degraded wind turbine blades are currently accumulating at a rate something like 100,000 metric tons per year, a rate expected to grow rapidly, this for a trivial form of energy that has been entirely useless in addressing climate change or reducing the use of dangerous fossil fuels. (For comparison, half a century of operations, while providing close to 20% of US electricity for a large portion of that time, the US accumulated about 80,000 tons of used nuclear fuel.) Wind turbines, world wide, despite all the cheering by uneducated anti-nukes, have never, combined with the future electronic waste that solar cells represent, ever produced half as much energy as nuclear energy is producing right now.
So much for "renewable."
History will not forgive us; nor should it.
= new reply since forum marked as read
