Written by Kevin killough on October 19, 2024. Posted in Current News
A farm in eastern Iowa has dust and debris from shattered wind turbine blades spread out over 240 acres, and they say the wind farm owner won’t clean it up.
Steve and Teresa Weets, according to The Gazette, agreed in 2012 to an easement allowing Acciona Wind Power to install two turbines on their family farm near Mechanicsville, Iowa. Both turbines have been struck by lightning – one of them twice – over the past 18 months.
The last time it happened was on Aug. 15, and a neighbor called the family early in the morning to say: “Your wind turbine’s on fire again.”
Now that the harvest is underway, the debris is hurting the family’s agricultural business. As the blade debris becomes more embedded in the topsoil, the family worries it will contaminate their corn.
After landowners waited months, Acciona removed one of the foundations, a company spokesperson told The Gazette, and they’re talking with landowners to determine the best way to remove the second foundation.
The [spokesperson also said] the process is complicated because the foundations of wind towers are made of concrete and steel.
The family has requested that the company use a crane rather than explosives to remove the second tower because explosives might scatter even more debris over the farm. The company has said a crane isn’t safe.
Cedar County, where Mechanicsville is located, requires a decommissioning bond, but that doesn’t cover cleanup efforts.
Blade pollution has become a growing concern following the disintegration of a blade at the Vineyard Wind project off the coast of Massachusetts’ Martha’s Vineyard.
Debris from the blade, which broke off and fell into the ocean in July, continues to wash up on the beaches of Nantucket, New York, and Rhode Island.
Data on blade failures is hard to come by, but according to a 2018 article in a trade publication, blades have a 0.5% failure rate.
(Please see also: https://docs.wind-watch.org/Toxic-wings-Damage-and-casualty-of-wind-turbine-blades_English_090523.pdf)
At the time, 700,000 blades were spinning at wind farms around the world. Since then, the amount of electricity generated from wind energy has increased by approximately 80%.
While it’s hard to say how many more blades are spinning today based solely on increases in the amount of electricity produced, there would be roughly 1.27 million blades today. That means over 6,300 blades break off of turbines each year across the world.
MassLive reports that a Nantucket board is hiring damage experts to assess the economic harm to the area’s fishing and tourism industries and the economic harm the incident caused. Nantucket’s government is also researching the likelihood that other blades could break off.
The blade was produced by GE Vernova, which also manufactured another blade that broke off a turbine at the Dogger Bank project off the coast of England. That was the second blade to break on that project.
GE Vernova blamed the Vineyard incident on a “manufacturing deviation,” but the company blamed installation and operational errors for the Dogger Bank blade failures.
The Vineyard Wind project currently has five turbines operational out of a planned 62. The New Bedford Light last week reported that one of the vessels that deliver the towers, nacelles, and 300-foot-long blades to Vineyard Wind was seen carrying at least two blades out of the Port of New Bedford.
Citing vessel tracking data, the Light reported that the ship wasn’t headed to the Vineyard Wind project, but rather to a port in France, where GE Vernova has a blade manufacturing facility.
Neither GE Vernova nor Vineyard Wind responded to the Light’s request for comment on why the blades were returning to France.
Even when wind blades don’t fail, they present a waste problem, as they are difficult, if not impossible, to recycle.
A 2017 study estimated that by 2050 the wind industry could produce 43 million tons of used blades.
Blade recycling programs are looking at using shredded blades as filler, or making furniture or other items out of them, but no long-term solution has yet been found.
See more here Climate Dispatch
See also:
If Biden-Harris admin’s offshore targets met, dozens of toxic blades could pollute, estimates show
It’s Not So Easy Being Green: If 30 gigawatts comes to pass, there will be over 6,400 turbine blades, each about 300-feet long, spinning over the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The blades have a history of shattering and polluting the shoreline.
Please see link for more.
Excerpt:
Bigger not better
Meghan Lapp, fisheries liaison and general manager at Seafreeze, Ltd., testified in August at a hearing in Brigantine, New Jersey, that the figure would be closer to 48 blade failures per year. Lapp used an estimated 3,000 turbines off the East Coast.
Lapp may be correct. The Vineyard Wind incident occurred during relatively calm weather after operating for only five months. While the project plans 62 turbines, only five have so far been made operational, each one spinning three blades. Extrapolating out to 12 months and assuming no more of the blades break, the current failure rate at the project is 16% per year.
Energy watchdog Robert Bryce reports on his Substack that the Haliade-X wind turbine used at Vineyard Wind, which has a diameter of over 650 square feet, sweeps an area of 38,000 square meters.
“In addition to the public relations disaster at Vineyard Wind, Big Wind is facing a crisis caused by simple physics. The turbines now being deployed onshore and offshore are failing far sooner than expected. Why? They have gotten too big,” Bryce wrote shortly after the blade incident.
In late August, a blade by the same manufacturer, GE Vernova, broke off a turbine at the Dogger Bank project off the coast of England, which was the second blade to break on that project. GE Vernova blamed the Vineyard incident on a “manufacturing deviation,” but the company blamed installation and operational errors for the Dogger Bank blade failures.
It’s possible that the upper end of generation capacity for offshore turbines has been met. If offshore wind developers pull back on the “bigger is better” approach to wind farms to avoid more blade failures, the size of the turbines would decrease. However, assuming goals for offshore wind generation remain the same, the number of turbines will increase, and Lapp’s estimate of blade failures will be more likely.
If turbines remain at 14 megawatts capacity or higher, it’s possible failure rates will be as high as those at Vineyard Wind and Dogger Bank. In that case, there will be fewer turbines with more failures.
Raining blades
The Vineyard Wind blade incident has created a serious problem for residents. Mary Chalke, a resident of Nantucket, posts regular videos on X about the debris washing up on the Nantucket beaches. Over two months after the incident, she’s reporting that residents are continuing to find debris.
Blades break off of onshore wind turbines as well, but on land, the debris can be picked up and hauled away. Even then, it presents a problem for disposal. In August 2023, Texas Monthly reported on a blade graveyard near Sweetwater, Texas, where thousands of blades were piling up. The blades were supposed to be recycled, but the facility wasn’t doing so. As of May 2024, though the company said the blades would be removed, the blades were still there.
A similar situation unfolded in Minnesota, in a small community called Grand Meadow, about 90 miles southeast of Minneapolis. More than 100 used blades were abandoned in an empty lot in the town. Two companies promised to recycle the blades, but both went bankrupt, according to the Star Tribune. This week, the Star reported, workers began removing the blades. The work is expected to finish by the end of October.
Blades are made to be durable, and that makes them difficult, if not impossible, to recycle. A 2017 study estimated that by 2050, the wind industry could produce 43 million tons of used blades. Blade recycling programs are looking at using shredded blades as filler, or making furniture or other items out of them.
However, there’s currently no solution that’s been scaled up to fully address the problem. That means for the time being, most will end up in landfills, which is better than ending up on the ocean floor.
EDITOR: WHAT DOES 43 MILLION TONS OF TURBINE BLADES LOOK LIKE?
By 2050, Used Wind Turbine Blades Will Exceed 43 Million Tons Of Waste
Because wind turbine blades are very difficult to recycle, the waste stream created by the retired blades is a mounting problem. By 2050, there will be 43 million tons of blade waste produced — the equivalent of 215,000 locomotives.
According to a 2017 study published in the scientific journal Waste Management, the world’s wind industry will be producing 43 million tons of blade waste by 2050, and up to 800,000 tons annually.
That’s the equivalent weight of 215,000 locomotives. The U.S. and Europe will account for 41% of that.
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/sweetwater-wind-turbine-blades-dump
The size and weight of the blades vary, but the average length is around 120 feet and they weigh around five tons. Some of the largest can be as long as a football field and weigh 20 tons.
Currently, there are no scalable, cost-effective technologies to recycle the blades, and most of them are going to landfills.
