Megan Hall: Welcome to Possibly, where we take on huge problems like the future of our planet and break them down into small questions with unexpected answers. I’m Megan Hall.
Today, we have a question from a listener:
Kevin Curran: I’m Kevin Curran, I’m from Providence, Rhode Island, and I’m an electrician.
Megan Hall: For the past ten years, Kevin has helped transition the state towards using renewable energy, but that’s made him wonder about what happens to wind turbines when they age.
Kevin Curran: Everyone sings the songs of wind and solar, but I wonder if anyone considers what happens to it when it’s done. Its productivity starts going down after a while. What do you do with the material when they’re no good anymore?
Megan Hall: We had Max Kozlov and Fatima Husain from our Possibly Team look into this. Welcome, Max and Fatima!
Max Kozlov: Hi, Megan!
Fatima Husain: Hello!
Megan Hall: So, do wind turbines break down over time?
Max Kozlov: Yes, they do — the same way any equipment does in coal, natural gas, and nuclear power plants.
Fatima Husain: But with wind power, being outside takes a toll on turbine parts, especially in cold places, where the windmills freeze and thaw in the winter.
Megan Hall: How long can these turbines really last?
Fatima Husain: It depends on the climate, but wind energy companies typically replace their turbines after 15 to 25 years.
Max Kozlov: That’s because when blades erode, they can’t catch the wind as efficiently, which means they generate less electricity.
Megan Hall: But those things are huge! What do companies do with them?
Fatima Husain: Well, you can recycle most of the parts of a wind turbine because they’re made of copper, steel, aluminum, or concrete.
Max Kozlov: But the blades are a bit different — they’re made of fiberglass, foam, balsa wood, metal, adhesive, and paint, which makes them a lot trickier to recycle.
Megan Hall: So, what do wind energy companies do with the blades?
Max Kozlov: The cheapest option right now is to bury them in a landfill. One spot in Wyoming received over half-a-million dollars to bury about a thousand blades.
Megan Hall: Whoa! It’s like a graveyard for wind turbines!
Fatima Husain: Yes, and these blades don’t really break down, so they’ll stay in the ground for a very, very long time.
Max Kozlov: Not to mention, these blades are huge! Some are longer than the length of a football field — which means they take up lots of space in landfills.
Fatima Husain: With wind energy becoming more popular, one report estimates that there could be as many as 370,000 tons of blade waste each year by 2050.
Max Kozlov: That’s the weight of nearly 30,000 school busses!
Megan Hall: Is burying these blades our only option?
Max Kozlov: Well, some wind energy companies burn the blades, but that process doesn’t generate much energy and it also contributes to pollution.
Fatima Husain: And some scientists are experimenting with other approaches. One of these people is Karl Englund, who’s chief technology officer at Global Fiberglass Solutions. He says he loves challenges like this.
Karl Englund: I’ve always been more focused on not what you could do with really cool materials, but how you can take materials that are abundant waste stream and then convert them into something good.
Max Kozlov: He says one of the reasons it’s been challenging to reuse fiberglass is because the material’s very cheap, which means the recycled material is even cheaper. But, he’s not giving up.
Karl Englund: We have to get of that mentality that we can just keep extracting stuff out of the Earth and utilizing a lot of energy and a lot of money to do that when we have these accessible feedstocks right at our fingertips — it’s just a matter of finding the right technologies.
Fatima Husain: So far, he’s experimented with turning the blades into car parts or insulation. He’s also developing a technique that grinds up the blades and presses them into pellets and fiber panels that can be used to make flooring and walls.
Max Kozlov: So, we might not need graveyards for these giant blades much longer.
Megan Hall: Great! Thanks, Max and Fatima!
That’s it for today. For more information, or to ask a question about the way you recycle, use energy, or make any other choice that affects the planet, go to the public’s radio dot org slash possibly. Or subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts.
Possibly is a co-production of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society and the Public’s Radio.
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