10 ms·

What happens to all the old wind turbines?

70 points by Kaibeezy 7y ago

Invictus0 7y ago
Why is it that the turbines can be turned into a bridge and a playground but can't continue to be used? What is the failure mode for these things?
- Retric 7y ago
  Spinning turbine blades are under significant mechanical stress. Individual blades are getting as tall as a 30 story buildings, but they rotate so you need to support all that weight from one end. Further, the tips are spinning at 100+MPH constantly so dust in the air is eroding the surface. On top of this weight savings are a major goal so their designed to just barely work for a given lifespan. So, blades that where pulled from a working turbine are still really strong, they are simply more likely to fail at some unknown point in the future. PS: Turbines from 20+ years ago are much smaller, but faced similar issues. For scale compare the turbine blade with cars in this shot and think this thing is rotating: https://www.technology.org/2018/03/23/here-is-the-worlds-largest-wind-turbine-blade/ https://www.technology.org/2018/03/23/here-is-the-worlds-lar...
  - gambiting 7y ago
    Are there any recorded instances of this happening? A turbine falling apart when taken past its design lifetime?
    - Animats 7y ago
      About 3,800 wind turbine blades fail per year, according to an insurer.[1] About 0.5% per year. A detailed analysis of blade failure modes: [2] There's an industry devoted to blade repair.[3] What they do looks a lot like body work for carbon-fiber aircraft, except that it's done in midair. Transmissions and bearings are more of a problem. "Turbine gearboxes are typically given a design life of 20 years, but few make it past the 10-year mark."[4] [1] https://www.enr.com/articles/42352-are-four-wind-turbine-failures-in-five-weeks-too-many-for-nextera-energy https://www.enr.com/articles/42352-are-four-wind-turbine-fai... [2] https://backend.orbit.dtu.dk/ws/portalfiles/portal/118222161/Database_about_blade_faults.pdf https://backend.orbit.dtu.dk/ws/portalfiles/portal/118222161... [3] http://fairwindres.com/wind-industry-maintenance/blade-repair/ http://fairwindres.com/wind-industry-maintenance/blade-repai... [4] https://www.windpowerengineering.com/wind-turbine-gearboxes-fail-hit-20-year-mark/ https://www.windpowerengineering.com/wind-turbine-gearboxes-...
      - jacquesm 7y ago
        > Turbine gearboxes are typically given a design life of 20 years, but few make it past the 10-year mark. That's why the biggest and best are direct drive.
    - donjoe 7y ago
      It is all about trying to avoid having a broken/breaking wind turbine. A spinning wind turbine falling apart is no fun for bystanders involved [0]. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nSB1SdVHqQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nSB1SdVHqQ
      - jacquesm 7y ago
        That's a towerstrike and overspeeding, nothing to do with the blades being worn out.
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    I.e. cumulative fatigue damage from the constant flexing of the blades.
- LegitShady 7y ago
  It's a 30 storey fiberglass building spinning at speed. The stress is high and the material fatigues over time. Eventually it will crack, a stress concentration will occur and the crack will propagate somewhere important and it will fail completely. Now take that same material and give it a much shorter span/length, and a much lower loading, and fatigue becomes less of an issue. I'm not sure what bridge they're talking about in specific but I don't see why they couldn't be beams for a pedestrian bridge providing. I bet the manufacturer has a lot of testing data too.
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    Cumulative fatigue damage goes up as the cube of the stress, if I recall correctly.
    - phkahler 7y ago
      Wouldn't that imply that a modest over-design could significantly improve blade life?
      - WalterBright 7y ago
        yes
      - LegitShady 7y ago
        They are designed to be constructable, affordable, reliable, and somewhat maintainable (as maintainable as a giant windmill full of electricity generating equipment can be I guess). If it was easy and cheap to make them last longer someone would do so and win the market.
- londons_explore 7y ago
  The failure mode is not as other posters have said mechanical, but is in fact usually a business decision. Plenty are lasting much longer than 25 years. Many wind turbines were built with subsidies to run them for 25 years. As soon as that time is up, they may no longer be worth running, especially since in many places wholesale power costs have dropped due to other subsidised wind and solar. Also, finding sites to build wind turbines is getting tricky - you need good wind, no complaining neighbours, good road and crane access, and a good grid connection. That usually makes existing wind turbine sites excellent candidates for building bigger better turbines which are 10x the size.
  - Retric 7y ago
    I was not suggesting me mechanical stress was the only issue, rather blades that needed to be able to withstand much larger stresses as part of a wind turbine than as playground equipment or as bridge components. However, it does directly cause problems. “The main reason to create fatigue in the wind turbine blades is cyclic loads. Variation of wind speed, annual gust, rotation of rotor, and variation of weight vector direction toward the local position of the blade [17] are the production sources of the cyclic loads.“ https://www.intechopen.com/books/wind-turbines-design-control-and-applications/composite-blades-of-wind-turbine-design-stress-analysis-aeroelasticity-and-fatigue https://www.intechopen.com/books/wind-turbines-design-contro... Study of fatigue damage in wind turbine blades “The inspection of damages detected in some blades of 300 kW wind turbines revealed that the nature of these damages was probably due to a fatigue mechanism. The causes that had originated the failure (superficial cracks, geometric concentrator, abrupt change of thickness) have been studied, verifying, by means of the simplified evaluation procedure of fatigue life of the “Germanischer Lloyd” (GL) standard, that these causes can explain the failure detected in the period of time in which it happened.“ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1350630708000472 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13506...
    - strainer 7y ago
      That seems like a relatively old study now. I think blade design and manufacture has developed rapidly. Here is a short piece on the testing of much larger modern blades designed to last at least 25 years offshore [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5m-jwwM3qRs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5m-jwwM3qRs
trogsworth 7y ago
Low Tech Magazine did a piece on this back in June: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2019/06/wooden-wind-turbines.html https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2019/06/wooden-wind-turbines...
squarefoot 7y ago
If I recall correctly, fiberglass is a pretty decent heat insulator. Wouldn't be possible to cut those blades into tiles, then reshape them to be perfectly flat and use them as heat insulation panels in non critical industrial applications?
- stcredzero 7y ago
  If I recall correctly, fiberglass is a pretty decent heat insulator. Wouldn't be possible to cut those blades into tiles The physics of insulators, like fiberglass batting. Basically, it works the same way as down feathers or fur. The material traps air into many, many somewhat separate pockets. This interrupts convective flows, which drastically slows down the rate at which heat can move through air. Since air is the opposite of dense, not much heat can be transmitted through air which does not move. Fiberglass tiles aren't going to have the same insulating property, just because they're also fiberglass.
  - c0restraint 7y ago
    What about crushing them and then kind of shredding it into a mulch to create the pockets?
- dehrmann 7y ago
  They're fiberglass composite, so fiberglass in epoxy, unlike fiberglass insulation.
8bitsrule 7y ago
We do need to find solutions for blade-waste. Ideally it would find its way into new blades. On other hand, how does blade-waste compare to energy- and non-energy- waste sources? Until that solution arrives: " municipal and commercial dumps will take most of the waste, which the American Wind Energy Association in Washington says is safest and cheapest. 'Wind turbine blades at the end of their operational life are landfill-safe...' [The group] pointed to an Electric Power Research Institute study that estimates all blade waste through 2050 would equal roughly .015% of all the municipal solid waste going to landfills in 2015 alone."[0] [0]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turbine-blades-can-t-be-recycled-so-they-re-piling-up-in-landfills https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb...
- jefftk 7y ago
  > We do need to find solutions for blade-waste. Why? We're in no danger of running out of space, and they're not toxic.
  - ajross 7y ago
    Yeah, I mean, all other things being equal it's better to find efficiencies where possible and not just throw things away needlessly. Folks like to laugh at it, but plastics manufacturing for one-use items like bags and straws has real externalities that aren't borne by the cost of manufacture. But in this particular situation: a quarter-century-old turbine blade has paid for itself so many times over already that this is just not where we need to be spending out time worrying about efficiencies. Even if we just bury the things, wind power remains (by far!) the most environmentally beneficial choice for almost all electrical markets.
    - WalterBright 7y ago
      > has real externalities If they're blowing around in the wind or dumped in the waterways, sure. If they're buried, none I've heard of.
      - 7y ago
gandalfian 7y ago
Sailing yachts too. Millions of affordable fiberglass yachts made since the 70's are now reaching the end of their lives. In the past abandoned wooden boats just rotted away. But the fiberglass hulks stick around. It's a coming problem.
- HenryKissinger 7y ago
  Nothing escapes entropy, but if you multiply the rate at which everything naturally decays with the sheer volume of things that exist and will one day need to be replaced, we're going to bankrupt the planet of its resources. I wish more things were made to last. Imagine working in a 5000 year old skyscraper that's as good as the day it opened, or driving a 500 year old car that's as reliable as the day you purchased it. Humanity's going to last a long, long time. Hopefully. At least resources like wood and water are renewable. But oil and metal aren't. When we run out of oil, we can kiss plastics and cosmetics goodbye. As for metals, recycling scrap metal and asteroid mining are our only long term options.
  - Joe-Z 7y ago
    >Imagine working in a 5000 year old skyscraper... Living in Europe and having ample opportunity to visit them, I'm always fascinated by the old cathedrals that just stand around in our city centers. I almost can't believe how people hundreds of years ago managed to erect these structures. And not only that but the level of detail and craftmanship that went into all of its components is mind-boggling. To me it also signifies a connection to previous generations which you don't often get anywhere else. Of course they are not nearly 5.000 years old, but it just sprang to my mind when I read this line.
    - fit2rule 7y ago
      Also living in Europe, I find myself in awe of this fact quite often. There was a time when 'high technology' meant, knowing how to cut stone in such a way that it could be transported and assembled by an illiterate mob into a vast cathedral. And then, there are the aquaducts and water mills scattered all over the region (Austria). What an astonishing thing to see, still in operation, hundreds of years after they were built, water wheels pulling water up into the castle ..
dodobirdlord 7y ago
Fiberglass is pretty inert, right? It's also used for boat hulls. I wonder if turbine blades could be cut up and used for artificial reef construction the way decommissioned ships sometimes are. But perhaps the blades are lighter than water.
- killjoywashere 7y ago
  As a diver, I have to say, artificial reef isn’t quite what you think. We dive wrecks all the time that are 60-130’ down and have been there for 70-100 years and barely have any coral, certainly not like the massive walls of coral elsewhere in the same islands. Some of it has to do with the depth: most life is in the 0-40’ zone. And the oxygen drops off quite a bit, which inhibits oxidation (rust). There’s another wreck we dive at 40’ that’s barely recognizable due to corrosion and life. There’s an area that has coke bottles from 1945 (the glass is date-stamped) and they barely have anything growing on them. If you dump fiberglass in shallow water, people are going to be pissed. If you dump fiberglass in deep water, it will likely not decompose for millennia. But it also won’t be a Mecca for perch and sharks like some make them out to be.
- rubinelli 7y ago
  Fiberglass would break down and release microplastics, though, so it is not as environmentally friendly as a sunk metal hull.
- allovernow 7y ago
  You can't work fiberglass like metal. It can't be welded and it fractures before it bends. That's partly why fiberglass parts in complex shapes tend to be expensive - they must be shaped at the time of manufacture before they cure. Fiberglass is a fiber reinforced resin which is typically built by laying down thin fibrous sheets in molds and "painting" them with liquid resin. Also labor intensive and hard to automate.
IshKebab 7y ago
Is burying them an issue?
melling 7y ago
We discussed this 3 days ago here too. Might have other insights: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22248351 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22248351
dsfyu404ed 7y ago
This is a non-issue. When we have enough of them for them to be readily available in large quantities we will find uses for them. Being slow to degrade when exposed to the elements makes them (or strips/panels cut out of them) suitable for all sorts of construction uses.
- skybrian 7y ago
  I wonder if they could be used to build a fence. Or maybe a wall?
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted but I think cross sectional cuts of turbine blade filled with dirt or concrete (as budget allows) would make for great retaining walls or erosion barriers.
- eru 7y ago
  Well, in a sense it becomes a non-issues when someone takes it serious as an issue and finds economic uses. Of course, that doesn't mean the whole of society has to worry about it. And in the worst case, we can just dump them on landfills until we know what to do with them.
LastZactionHero 7y ago
> It stretches a hundred metres from a bend in the North Platte River in Casper, Wyoming. 100m? For real? > Burying them doesn't sound very green. Why do I care if something doesn't sounds green? Tell me an actual consequence.
anonsivalley652 7y ago
Clickbait FUD. Here we go again, the BBC taking up side of the fossil fuel industry to manufacturer consent with a propaganda FUD piece against renewables or stir up some phony outrage to sell ads. No renewable energy source is perfect, but it's better than "clean coal" or tarsands. Hand-wringing about the least bad option doesn't do anything constructive, it just demonstrates dilettante ignorance and snobbery to find minutiae to complain about when the climate change emergency, antibiotic/antimycotic resistances and renewed threats of nuclear war are just some of the numerous Swords of Damocles over us right now. Instead of informing, the majority of the corporate mainstream media choose bread and circuses over committing journalism. Journalism is a crime now, my bad! #FreeAssange et. al.
agumonkey 7y ago
Maybe give them to association for upcycling or non industrial dismantling ?

70 points by Kaibeezy 7y ago

Why is it that the turbines can be turned into a bridge and a playground but can't continue to be used? What is the failure mode for these things?

Retric 7y ago
Spinning turbine blades are under significant mechanical stress. Individual blades are getting as tall as a 30 story buildings, but they rotate so you need to support all that weight from one end. Further, the tips are spinning at 100+MPH constantly so dust in the air is eroding the surface. On top of this weight savings are a major goal so their designed to just barely work for a given lifespan. So, blades that where pulled from a working turbine are still really strong, they are simply more likely to fail at some unknown point in the future. PS: Turbines from 20+ years ago are much smaller, but faced similar issues. For scale compare the turbine blade with cars in this shot and think this thing is rotating: https://www.technology.org/2018/03/23/here-is-the-worlds-largest-wind-turbine-blade/ https://www.technology.org/2018/03/23/here-is-the-worlds-lar...
- gambiting 7y ago
  Are there any recorded instances of this happening? A turbine falling apart when taken past its design lifetime?
  - Animats 7y ago
    About 3,800 wind turbine blades fail per year, according to an insurer.[1] About 0.5% per year. A detailed analysis of blade failure modes: [2] There's an industry devoted to blade repair.[3] What they do looks a lot like body work for carbon-fiber aircraft, except that it's done in midair. Transmissions and bearings are more of a problem. "Turbine gearboxes are typically given a design life of 20 years, but few make it past the 10-year mark."[4] [1] https://www.enr.com/articles/42352-are-four-wind-turbine-failures-in-five-weeks-too-many-for-nextera-energy https://www.enr.com/articles/42352-are-four-wind-turbine-fai... [2] https://backend.orbit.dtu.dk/ws/portalfiles/portal/118222161/Database_about_blade_faults.pdf https://backend.orbit.dtu.dk/ws/portalfiles/portal/118222161... [3] http://fairwindres.com/wind-industry-maintenance/blade-repair/ http://fairwindres.com/wind-industry-maintenance/blade-repai... [4] https://www.windpowerengineering.com/wind-turbine-gearboxes-fail-hit-20-year-mark/ https://www.windpowerengineering.com/wind-turbine-gearboxes-...
    - jacquesm 7y ago
      > Turbine gearboxes are typically given a design life of 20 years, but few make it past the 10-year mark. That's why the biggest and best are direct drive.
  - donjoe 7y ago
    It is all about trying to avoid having a broken/breaking wind turbine. A spinning wind turbine falling apart is no fun for bystanders involved [0]. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nSB1SdVHqQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nSB1SdVHqQ
    - jacquesm 7y ago
      That's a towerstrike and overspeeding, nothing to do with the blades being worn out.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  I.e. cumulative fatigue damage from the constant flexing of the blades.
LegitShady 7y ago
It's a 30 storey fiberglass building spinning at speed. The stress is high and the material fatigues over time. Eventually it will crack, a stress concentration will occur and the crack will propagate somewhere important and it will fail completely. Now take that same material and give it a much shorter span/length, and a much lower loading, and fatigue becomes less of an issue. I'm not sure what bridge they're talking about in specific but I don't see why they couldn't be beams for a pedestrian bridge providing. I bet the manufacturer has a lot of testing data too.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  Cumulative fatigue damage goes up as the cube of the stress, if I recall correctly.
  - phkahler 7y ago
    Wouldn't that imply that a modest over-design could significantly improve blade life?
    - WalterBright 7y ago
      yes
    - LegitShady 7y ago
      They are designed to be constructable, affordable, reliable, and somewhat maintainable (as maintainable as a giant windmill full of electricity generating equipment can be I guess). If it was easy and cheap to make them last longer someone would do so and win the market.
londons_explore 7y ago
The failure mode is not as other posters have said mechanical, but is in fact usually a business decision. Plenty are lasting much longer than 25 years. Many wind turbines were built with subsidies to run them for 25 years. As soon as that time is up, they may no longer be worth running, especially since in many places wholesale power costs have dropped due to other subsidised wind and solar. Also, finding sites to build wind turbines is getting tricky - you need good wind, no complaining neighbours, good road and crane access, and a good grid connection. That usually makes existing wind turbine sites excellent candidates for building bigger better turbines which are 10x the size.
- Retric 7y ago
  I was not suggesting me mechanical stress was the only issue, rather blades that needed to be able to withstand much larger stresses as part of a wind turbine than as playground equipment or as bridge components. However, it does directly cause problems. “The main reason to create fatigue in the wind turbine blades is cyclic loads. Variation of wind speed, annual gust, rotation of rotor, and variation of weight vector direction toward the local position of the blade [17] are the production sources of the cyclic loads.“ https://www.intechopen.com/books/wind-turbines-design-control-and-applications/composite-blades-of-wind-turbine-design-stress-analysis-aeroelasticity-and-fatigue https://www.intechopen.com/books/wind-turbines-design-contro... Study of fatigue damage in wind turbine blades “The inspection of damages detected in some blades of 300 kW wind turbines revealed that the nature of these damages was probably due to a fatigue mechanism. The causes that had originated the failure (superficial cracks, geometric concentrator, abrupt change of thickness) have been studied, verifying, by means of the simplified evaluation procedure of fatigue life of the “Germanischer Lloyd” (GL) standard, that these causes can explain the failure detected in the period of time in which it happened.“ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1350630708000472 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13506...
  - strainer 7y ago
    That seems like a relatively old study now. I think blade design and manufacture has developed rapidly. Here is a short piece on the testing of much larger modern blades designed to last at least 25 years offshore [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5m-jwwM3qRs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5m-jwwM3qRs

trogsworth 7y ago

Low Tech Magazine did a piece on this back in June: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2019/06/wooden-wind-turbines.html https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2019/06/wooden-wind-turbines...

squarefoot 7y ago

If I recall correctly, fiberglass is a pretty decent heat insulator. Wouldn't be possible to cut those blades into tiles, then reshape them to be perfectly flat and use them as heat insulation panels in non critical industrial applications?

stcredzero 7y ago
If I recall correctly, fiberglass is a pretty decent heat insulator. Wouldn't be possible to cut those blades into tiles The physics of insulators, like fiberglass batting. Basically, it works the same way as down feathers or fur. The material traps air into many, many somewhat separate pockets. This interrupts convective flows, which drastically slows down the rate at which heat can move through air. Since air is the opposite of dense, not much heat can be transmitted through air which does not move. Fiberglass tiles aren't going to have the same insulating property, just because they're also fiberglass.
- c0restraint 7y ago
  What about crushing them and then kind of shredding it into a mulch to create the pockets?
dehrmann 7y ago
They're fiberglass composite, so fiberglass in epoxy, unlike fiberglass insulation.

8bitsrule 7y ago

We do need to find solutions for blade-waste. Ideally it would find its way into new blades. On other hand, how does blade-waste compare to energy- and non-energy- waste sources? Until that solution arrives: " municipal and commercial dumps will take most of the waste, which the American Wind Energy Association in Washington says is safest and cheapest. 'Wind turbine blades at the end of their operational life are landfill-safe...' [The group] pointed to an Electric Power Research Institute study that estimates all blade waste through 2050 would equal roughly .015% of all the municipal solid waste going to landfills in 2015 alone."[0] [0]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turbine-blades-can-t-be-recycled-so-they-re-piling-up-in-landfills https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb...

jefftk 7y ago
> We do need to find solutions for blade-waste. Why? We're in no danger of running out of space, and they're not toxic.
- ajross 7y ago
  Yeah, I mean, all other things being equal it's better to find efficiencies where possible and not just throw things away needlessly. Folks like to laugh at it, but plastics manufacturing for one-use items like bags and straws has real externalities that aren't borne by the cost of manufacture. But in this particular situation: a quarter-century-old turbine blade has paid for itself so many times over already that this is just not where we need to be spending out time worrying about efficiencies. Even if we just bury the things, wind power remains (by far!) the most environmentally beneficial choice for almost all electrical markets.
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    > has real externalities If they're blowing around in the wind or dumped in the waterways, sure. If they're buried, none I've heard of.
    - 7y ago

gandalfian 7y ago

Sailing yachts too. Millions of affordable fiberglass yachts made since the 70's are now reaching the end of their lives. In the past abandoned wooden boats just rotted away. But the fiberglass hulks stick around. It's a coming problem.

HenryKissinger 7y ago
Nothing escapes entropy, but if you multiply the rate at which everything naturally decays with the sheer volume of things that exist and will one day need to be replaced, we're going to bankrupt the planet of its resources. I wish more things were made to last. Imagine working in a 5000 year old skyscraper that's as good as the day it opened, or driving a 500 year old car that's as reliable as the day you purchased it. Humanity's going to last a long, long time. Hopefully. At least resources like wood and water are renewable. But oil and metal aren't. When we run out of oil, we can kiss plastics and cosmetics goodbye. As for metals, recycling scrap metal and asteroid mining are our only long term options.
- Joe-Z 7y ago
  >Imagine working in a 5000 year old skyscraper... Living in Europe and having ample opportunity to visit them, I'm always fascinated by the old cathedrals that just stand around in our city centers. I almost can't believe how people hundreds of years ago managed to erect these structures. And not only that but the level of detail and craftmanship that went into all of its components is mind-boggling. To me it also signifies a connection to previous generations which you don't often get anywhere else. Of course they are not nearly 5.000 years old, but it just sprang to my mind when I read this line.
  - fit2rule 7y ago
    Also living in Europe, I find myself in awe of this fact quite often. There was a time when 'high technology' meant, knowing how to cut stone in such a way that it could be transported and assembled by an illiterate mob into a vast cathedral. And then, there are the aquaducts and water mills scattered all over the region (Austria). What an astonishing thing to see, still in operation, hundreds of years after they were built, water wheels pulling water up into the castle ..

dodobirdlord 7y ago

Fiberglass is pretty inert, right? It's also used for boat hulls. I wonder if turbine blades could be cut up and used for artificial reef construction the way decommissioned ships sometimes are. But perhaps the blades are lighter than water.

killjoywashere 7y ago
As a diver, I have to say, artificial reef isn’t quite what you think. We dive wrecks all the time that are 60-130’ down and have been there for 70-100 years and barely have any coral, certainly not like the massive walls of coral elsewhere in the same islands. Some of it has to do with the depth: most life is in the 0-40’ zone. And the oxygen drops off quite a bit, which inhibits oxidation (rust). There’s another wreck we dive at 40’ that’s barely recognizable due to corrosion and life. There’s an area that has coke bottles from 1945 (the glass is date-stamped) and they barely have anything growing on them. If you dump fiberglass in shallow water, people are going to be pissed. If you dump fiberglass in deep water, it will likely not decompose for millennia. But it also won’t be a Mecca for perch and sharks like some make them out to be.
rubinelli 7y ago
Fiberglass would break down and release microplastics, though, so it is not as environmentally friendly as a sunk metal hull.
allovernow 7y ago
You can't work fiberglass like metal. It can't be welded and it fractures before it bends. That's partly why fiberglass parts in complex shapes tend to be expensive - they must be shaped at the time of manufacture before they cure. Fiberglass is a fiber reinforced resin which is typically built by laying down thin fibrous sheets in molds and "painting" them with liquid resin. Also labor intensive and hard to automate.

IshKebab 7y ago

Is burying them an issue?

melling 7y ago

We discussed this 3 days ago here too. Might have other insights: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22248351 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22248351

dsfyu404ed 7y ago

This is a non-issue. When we have enough of them for them to be readily available in large quantities we will find uses for them. Being slow to degrade when exposed to the elements makes them (or strips/panels cut out of them) suitable for all sorts of construction uses.

skybrian 7y ago
I wonder if they could be used to build a fence. Or maybe a wall?
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted but I think cross sectional cuts of turbine blade filled with dirt or concrete (as budget allows) would make for great retaining walls or erosion barriers.
eru 7y ago
Well, in a sense it becomes a non-issues when someone takes it serious as an issue and finds economic uses. Of course, that doesn't mean the whole of society has to worry about it. And in the worst case, we can just dump them on landfills until we know what to do with them.

LastZactionHero 7y ago

> It stretches a hundred metres from a bend in the North Platte River in Casper, Wyoming. 100m? For real? > Burying them doesn't sound very green. Why do I care if something doesn't sounds green? Tell me an actual consequence.

anonsivalley652 7y ago

Clickbait FUD. Here we go again, the BBC taking up side of the fossil fuel industry to manufacturer consent with a propaganda FUD piece against renewables or stir up some phony outrage to sell ads. No renewable energy source is perfect, but it's better than "clean coal" or tarsands. Hand-wringing about the least bad option doesn't do anything constructive, it just demonstrates dilettante ignorance and snobbery to find minutiae to complain about when the climate change emergency, antibiotic/antimycotic resistances and renewed threats of nuclear war are just some of the numerous Swords of Damocles over us right now. Instead of informing, the majority of the corporate mainstream media choose bread and circuses over committing journalism. Journalism is a crime now, my bad! #FreeAssange et. al.

agumonkey 7y ago

Maybe give them to association for upcycling or non industrial dismantling ?