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Power

Wind Turbine Giant Develops Solution To Keep Blades Out of Landfills (bloomberg.com) 145

Posted by BeauHD from the re-use-and-recycle dept.
Vestas, the world's largest producer of wind turbines, says it has developed a chemical solution that allows the blades -- made with durable epoxy resin -- to be broken down and recycled. Bloomberg reports: "This signals a new era for the wind industry," Vestas said in a statement. If it's implemented at scale, the technology can be used on both old blades sitting in landfills and those in active wind farms, the company added. It's a potential solution for what could be a massive sustainability problem for the wind industry. Industry body Wind Europe has previously estimated that about 25,000 metric tons of blades a year will be decommissioned by 2025, rising to 52,000 tons a year by 2030. The group has called on European authorities to ban blades from going into landfills.

Vestas's process is the result of joint initiative including Denmark's Aarhus University and US-based Olin Corp. The company now plans to move it from the lab to a pilot project for two years, before rolling it out on a commercial scale. Its cost hasn't been disclosed.
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Wind Turbine Giant Develops Solution To Keep Blades Out of Landfills More

Wind Turbine Giant Develops Solution To Keep Blades Out of Landfills

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  • In before the idiots who don't understand context. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by The Evil Atheist ( 2484676 ) on Thursday February 09, 2023 @05:09AM (#63277889)
    Humans produce over 30 BILLION tons of CO2 a year.

    Humans produce over 50 MILLION tons of electronic waste a year.

    Even if we go the completely generous route of 100 THOUSAND tons of wind turbine blades a year, we would be hardly making a dent.

    We're much better off forcing companies to make things repairable. I can live with 100 THOUSAND tons of wind turbine "waste", if we can even get rid of 1 MILLION tons of electronic waste.

    • Re:In before the idiots who don't understand conte (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Chas ( 5144 ) on Thursday February 09, 2023 @05:17AM (#63277899) Homepage Journal

      YOU can live with 100K tons of wind turbine waste.

      Because YOU don't HAVE TO live with it.

      It gets chopped up and/or dumped into a landfill FAR from where you're at.

      Reducing waste at every point of product life is desirable.

      And trying to prioritize one form of waste over another is a false choice.

      • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday February 09, 2023 @05:38AM (#63277913)
        Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • YOU can live with 100K tons of wind turbine waste.

        Because YOU don't HAVE TO live with it.

        It gets chopped up and/or dumped into a landfill FAR from where you're at.

        Reducing waste at every point of product life is desirable.

        And trying to prioritize one form of waste over another is a false choice.

        He has a point. Getting your panties in a twist over 100k tons of windmill blades and ignoring 50 MILLION tons of electronic waste is stupid. It is stupid for the same reason that hunting down and jailing small time shoplifters with all the obsession of captain Ahab while allowing white collar criminals to continue stealing billions is stupid. You will always be better off concentrating on eliminating your problems starting with whatever is causing the most damage and working your way down the list. Small

        • To be fair, we *can* recycle most e-waste, we just chose not to for various reasons.
          Previously, we *could not* recycle turbine blades, and now we can.
          Now we can ignorantly chose to not recycle both of them despite our ability to do so, bringing our wastefulness on to a more even footing.
        • But, but, but... 'Muricans looove landfill so much. The more toxic, the better, & especially when they can export it to other people's countries.

        • It is stupid for the same reason that hunting down and jailing small time shoplifters with all the obsession of captain Ahab while allowing white collar criminals to continue stealing billions is stupid. You will always be better off concentrating on eliminating your problems starting with whatever is causing the most damage and working your way down the list. Small fry should come last.

          Then again, lots of small things can add up. Shoplifting is a problem larger than any one shoplifter, but, you're right, going after the entire population of shoplifters, while easier, is inefficient. In cases like this, it would be better to find ways of preventing the issue as a whole. In the other hand, white-collar criminals are (probably) fewer, but finding and prosecuting them is often expensive and time-consuming. Arguably, finding ways to prevent those crimes would help too. As an aside, compar

      • On the other hand many people who try to diss wind energy because of blades that aren't easily recyclable don't acknowledge that existing power plants have their own problems - what to do with coal ash waste, how to recycle the old turbines, what about the nuclear waste. Similar with blades hitting some birds, the fossil fuel industry kills vastly more birds overall, the hydroelectric dams are killing fish, etc. Reducing waste is good, but it's being used in a one sided effort to push back against renewab

      • And trying to prioritize one form of waste over another is a false choice.

        No it's not. There are orders of magnitudes of differences between various wastes and their affects on ... well everything, environment, smell, health etc.

        In fact every western country in the world has regulations forcing prioritisation of forms of waste because they recognise that not all forms of waste are equal.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by guruevi ( 827432 )

      Wind turbine waste will reach 6.5 million metric tons in a few years.

      • Sounds like we should do nothing now and wait for the problem to come to a head. Seems to have worked for global warming, zoonotic diseases, and the Baltics.

    • In the waste problem needs to be attacked from multiple angles. Every closed system you can find is the low hanging fruit. You can generally get an industry to standardize and work on a scale where things don't get too expensive. Understanding the materials in the thing you are attempting to break down and possibly recycle is important. When you can't identify it, then it goes in a landfill.

      For example, recycling lead acid batteries for cars is a closed system. You get a rebate for your old "core" when you

      • The plastic and stuff ends up being trash though, but by weight it's mostly lead so I call it a win.

        The plastic cases are also recycled. Cars are the most aggressively recycled consumer good, and the battery is the most aggressively recycled part of the car.

    • Humans produce over 30 BILLION tons of CO2 a year.

      Not really a relevant comparison. CO2 doesn't end up in landfills. Just sayin' ...

  • The group has called on European authorities to ban blades from going into landfills.

    • Re:the nicest sentence of the summary is (Score:5, Interesting)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Thursday February 09, 2023 @06:14AM (#63277969) Homepage Journal

      On one hand, that needs to happen. On the other hand, they're doing this now because they now have a plan for being the only company which can comply with such a regulation, so it would harm their competitors (who would have to license the tech from them.)

      • It would be hard to mandate that the blades not go to landfill if there weren't any other viable alternatives. Now that there is such an alternative, it's suddenly good policy. Surely the company who came out with such a thing first would want it to be mandated. Such is the complexity of life. Although what that *also* tells me is that the recycling cost is higher than the landfilling cost. Otherwise no such mandate would be needed.

        • It was always good policy that everything should be recyclable, and/or in general that whoever produced it should be responsible for disposing of it. That this was not already the policy is how we got nonrecyclable turbine blades in the first place. They would have figured out another way to do it.

          By the same token, of course, energy producers should be required to fix the same amount of CO2 they emit...

          • Are you sure about that? I don't think it's quite so simple here. The requirement for blades that can be recycled might have had negative effects on the development of wind turbines and the market for their electricity. It would severely limit the set of materials that can be used. Possibly to the point that wind would not have been economical. This is especially true because fossil fuel plants don't have this requirement. If such policies of everything being recyclable had existed since the start of

            • Are you sure about that?

              Yes.

              The requirement for blades that can be recycled might have had negative effects on the development of wind turbines and the market for their electricity.

              Take away the fossil fuel subsidies and it wouldn't.

    • The group has called on European authorities to ban blades from going into landfills.

      Who says they're going into landfills anyway?

      There's all sorts of people using them as building material. They're white, they're interestingly curvy, they're every architect's dream.

      https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]

      • Who says they're going into landfills anyway?

        Everyone. In every article you linked.

        • I guess Google served you results based on your history.

          I got lots of links to people building things out of turbine blades.

      • They're white, they're interestingly curvy, they're every architect's dream.

        I hear a distant voice, demanding an answer. The voice is the combined voices of the 76 (or is it 77) people who died in the Grenfell Tower fire. The question they want an answer to is "do you have a fire resistance certificate for that building material, and public liability insurance cover against it killing your customer's tenants over the expected lifetime of the building?"

        The 30-something architect who uses this sort of uncert

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by guruevi ( 827432 )

        Yeah, let's build houses out of carcinogenic waste.

        • Yeah, let's build houses out of carcinogenic waste.

          YMMV but I get links to people building bike shelters and bridges out of them, not dwellings.

          PS: They're not carcinogenic.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tragedy ( 27079 )

          Like concrete (the silica dust in cement is carcinogenic? Or wood (ditto for sawdust)? Or plaster? Or steel? I'm not sure there are many construction materials that are _not_ carcinogenic.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by guruevi ( 827432 )

      But either the tax payer or the people putting up the wind turbines will have to pay for that which will make it even more expensive than today's status quo which is use the subsidies to put up the wind turbines and then abandon them as soon as subsidies run out because they're not profitable.

    • They could always be recycled ... but it was prohibitively expensive and so nobody did it ... ....this just means that it is now merely expensive ...

  • No one seems to care about coal ash ...

    Or nuclear waste ...

    How much nuclear waste do we have in relation to completely inert fibre glass wind mill blades?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Snuden ( 252397 )

      The spent fuel from nuclear energy production is highly controlled and accounted for, sealed in giant caskets.

      • Oh, you want to nitpick about the fact that spent nuclear fuel is at the moment not in "land fills".

        Seems you did not get my point ... (*facepalm*)

    • What do you mean no one cares? Neither of those things get sent to landfill and both of them have endless amounts of regulation about how they are handled.

      Put your strawman back in field where he belongs.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Pascoea ( 968200 )
        Coal ash (both fly ash (primarily silicon dioxide, aluminum oxide, calcium oxide) and bottom ash (essentially glass)) are absolutely landfilled. The nice thing about fly ash is you can make concrete, amongst many other things, out of it. Bottom ash can be used for things like landscaping, again, amongst other things. But as with anything else, pure economics means a sizeable chunk of it is just buried or pumped into collection ponds and left there to leach into groundwater.
        • On the one hand you describe ashes as being essentially glass, as if that means they're inert. On the other hand you describe the same ash sitting in settlement ponds as "leaching [into groundwater]", which is definitely not an "inert" behaviour. You can't have it both ways - or as they say in Yorkshire, "shit, or get off the pot!"

          Glasses, depending on their composition, can very definitely be not inert - they're vulnerable to leaching to release minerals in the glass into pore waters (which may or may not

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Pascoea ( 968200 )

            On the one hand you describe ashes as being essentially glass, as if that means they're inert. On the other hand you describe the same ash sitting in settlement ponds as "leaching [into groundwater]", which is definitely not an "inert" behaviour.

            Two points. First is there is fly ash and bottom ash. Fly ash is the fine particulate that comes out with the flue gas at the "top" of the boiler. It is filtered out by either electrostatic precipitators or giant filters. Bottom ash is (in the plants I have experience with) is literally cooled molten silicate (IE glass) containing the trace elements you mentioned. They are too heavy to be carried out of the boiler by the combustion process, and are removed from the bottom of the boiler. They are very diff

            • Bottom ash is [...] literally cooled molten silicate (IE glass) containing the trace elements you mentioned. They are too heavy to be carried out of the boiler by the combustion process,

              If bottom ash is made with minerals "too heavy to go up the flue", then how come Greenland ice cores have a measurable, significant signature of lead minerals that increases substantially at the time that the Romans took over Britain (and particularly, the lead mining and processing industries of the Peak District)?

              The maj

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by Pascoea ( 968200 )

                I would assume, based on your name and comments, you're some sort of geologist. Either by hobby or occupation. So you're probably well more qualified than I to answer most of those questions. I'm a computer nerd, but I spent about 5 or 6 years crawling around various power plants out in North Dakota. I also can't tell if you're trying to troll me, or asking honest questions. I assume, for now, it's the latter so I'll add what detail I can.

                If bottom ash is made with minerals "too heavy to go up the flue"...The majority of the heavy metals may go into the "bottom ash" compared to the "fly ash", but it's a partition not a clear separation.

                Agreed. From what I understand, it's not the composition of the mat

                • Yes, I'm a geologist by trade (I actually just had my Fellowship renewed ; paperwork came through a couple of days ago.). No trolling here.

                  Most archaeologists & climate scientists ascribe the ~100CE to 500CE increase in Greenland ice lead contents to the Romans, because it aligns with their records (taxation, silver production) of the industry. However they got enough particulates up the flue, they did it. With chimney stacks probably no higher than 10m.

                  regarding "fly ash" versus "bottom ash", I would

                  • Re: (Score:2)

                    by Pascoea ( 968200 )

                    I would expect that you couldn't take two sample compositions and say, confidently, that this one is fly ash, and that one bottom ash

                    Honestly, you can tell by looking at it. Fly ash is the consistency of talc, and is a cream colored. Bottom ash is about the consistency of gritty sand, 1mm ish if I had to guess, and is deep black. When I say it's glass, I'm not exaggerating. It looks like ground up volcanic glass. They literally use it for sand traps at golf courses. [tripadvisor.ca] Sorry for the stupid tripadvisor link, I couldn't find a better pic.

                    Oh, and the used filters are going to be a disposal problem too.

                    They "pump" the flue gas through a shower of pulverized limestone slurry. SOx gets "absorbed" and the

                    • Leave the ash (fly or bottom) in the landscape for a short time (10,000 years or so), or distribute it as a 1% addition to sea-bottom muck so you have to try to do your interpretation on geochemistry, and you'll find it much harder to tell. If you prepare a slide of the specimen and then get a human eyeball to look at it, you're looking at a cost of several hundred dollars (for sample preparation time plus sample analysis time) compared to a few tens of dollars for a geochemical "major element" analysis.

                      Wh

      • Both get put on "land fills" however you want to call it.

        Or do they magically disappear?

        We probably have somewhere in the range of 1000 times to 1 million times more coal ash than wind turbine blades: but no one cares. So? Why care about wind turbine blades?

    • Re:What about coal ash? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Megane ( 129182 ) on Thursday February 09, 2023 @07:09AM (#63278027)

      Most "nuclear waste" is fuel that has gone from 99% pure to 95% pure (approximations). We're still using nuclear power plants that can't use it, because the NIBYS (and NIYBYs) won't let new ones be built, so the same old barely-safe ones get extended for decades. "Spent" nuclear fuel is just fuel that can't be used by the old style reactors, but it still has plenty of energy left. And most of the worst of it is short-lived isotopes with half-lives of a few years to a few hundred years. The shorter the half-life, the higher the energy.

      Meanwhile, these used wind blades are fucking enormous. They get rolled down the highway one at a time, only limited in size by how big of a single blade can be transported by road. My mind boggles at the amount of "chemicals" it will take to dissolve even one of these things. And I'm sure that most of them were still usable before being chopped up, they're just not the size that the shiny new turbines need, time to throw them away.

      • I've ben thinking for a few years now, some super-cash-positive company like Apple should swoop in and as efficiently as possible suck up the entire nuclear waste industry and just stockpile it.

        There will be a one-time race for it (as there was with used fryer grease) and there will be a one-time bump of availability -> cash.

        The reason I say a lot of cash on hand is necessary is that you still have to store it correctly until then. Still, thats a LOT of energy just sitting around.

      • Most "nuclear waste" is fuel that has gone from 99% pure to 95% pure (approximations). We're still using nuclear power plants that can't use it, because the NIBYS (and NIYBYs) won't let new ones be built, so the same old barely-safe ones get extended for decades. "Spent" nuclear fuel is just fuel that can't be used by the old style reactors, but it still has plenty of energy left. And most of the worst of it is short-lived isotopes with half-lives of a few years to a few hundred years. The shorter the half-life, the higher the energy.

        It's not just about NIMBY, its about private capital being unwilling to invest in nuclear without massive state subsidies, state insurance guarantees and tax breaks. That is literally market players voting with their wallets.

        Meanwhile, these used wind blades are fucking enormous. They get rolled down the highway one at a time, only limited in size by how big of a single blade can be transported by road. My mind boggles at the amount of "chemicals" it will take to dissolve even one of these things. And I'm sure that most of them were still usable before being chopped up, they're just not the size that the shiny new turbines need, time to throw them away.

        [citation needed]

        • It's not just about NIMBY, its about private capital being unwilling to invest in nuclear without massive state subsidies, state insurance guarantees and tax breaks. That is literally market players voting with their wallets.

          We've been subsidizing renewables for decades [www.bmwk.de]. How is that "market players voting with their wallets"?

      • Most "nuclear waste" is fuel that has gone from 99% pure to 95% pure (approximations).
        No idea what yo mu mean with "pure".

        Nuclear waste is what remains when you burn "fuel" that contains fissionable products. Usually, about 6% of the "fuel" is fissionable. Usually when roughly half of that is "burned" the reactor stops working.

        So the waste is more or less the same as it was before, when it still was fuel. Now it is not fuel anymore. No idea where that American myth is coming from that reactors get emptied

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Are you saying that NIMBYs in China and Russia and many other countries where the rights of the individual are inconsequential to their industrial strategies are preventing them from developing nuclear plants that can make use of all this spent fuel?

        Seems strange given that they could make massive profits getting paid to take away nuclear waste and then using it to generate electricity.

        Or maybe the technology doesn't work and every attempt to do it on an industrial scale has ended in failure.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by guruevi ( 827432 )

          China is putting up a new nuke plant every 6 months. Even with current models, the amount of high energy waste produced is minimal, about 1g per 4MWh produced.

          Even if you produced all energy consumed in the US using nuclear (including driving, industrial etc), you'd end up with approximately 100,000 tons of high energy waste. That's 400,000x less waste than current CO2 emissions in the US. Even if you don't re-use it (which it would definitely be possible to do, but perhaps not economical), you can put that

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

            And yet... They didn't. It's no good angrily ranting about it. How are you planning to make it actually happen?

            The US can't even find a coal mine to put its existing waste in.

      • Most nuclear waste is very low level radioactive waste that because it is radioactive and from nuclear power can't just be landfilled or recycled, but the amount of radiation is so low if it were from anywhere else it could be ...
        The next biggest category is the building and parts of the reactor to be thrown away when they are repaired or dismantled

        Spent nuclear fuel is the least bulky, as it is very compact and there is surprisingly little of it ...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tragedy ( 27079 )

        Meanwhile, these used wind blades are fucking enormous. They get rolled down the highway one at a time, only limited in size by how big of a single blade can be transported by road. My mind boggles at the amount of "chemicals" it will take to dissolve even one of these things. And I'm sure that most of them were still usable before being chopped up, they're just not the size that the shiny new turbines need, time to throw them away.

        Yeah, they weigh tens of tons. That's almost a significant fraction of the weight of a single house... of which the turbine will power thousands. Whatever will be done with the waste from all of those houses... I mean turbine blades. Now, it is true that a turbine blade does not last as long as a house, but its lifespan is not thousands of times longer. Eventually, all those houses that a turbine blade powers will have to be replaced, generating thousands of times as much waste as one blade. So why so conce

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dargaud ( 518470 )
      Well, France which is the most nuclear country, has produced about 20kg of total waste per inhabitant. If you count only the dangerous mid-life wastes, it falls down to about 50g/person total (if my back of the envelope computation is correct).

      • And metering waste by that metric: makes you an idiot.

        Next level: tell us how/where France is storing the waste.

        (I save myself the indignity to tell you what you are by using the appropriated derogative)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by guruevi ( 827432 )

      On average, the waste from a reactor supplying a person’s electricity needs for a year would be about the size of a brick. Only 5 grams of this is high-level waste – about the same weight as a sheet of paper.

      • Stlll we do not know where to store it.

        And my point was: why the hate abot wind turbine blades - which dop nothing - when coal ash or nuclear waste is a real problem?

    • Used fuel (aka nuclear waste) has never harmed a single person. It is a non problem. Wind turbines are also a non problem. Coal ash is a problem. Wonder why Germany picked coal ash over used fuel. Probably because they are stupid and/or evil.

      • I wonder why you think Germany "picked coal ash over used (nuclear) fuel".

        Are you an idiot?

        Coal ash gor reduced greatly recent years - dumb ass.

  • They would be far easier to recycle.

    • They are aluminum composite, not fully aluminum. If they were only aluminum then recycling them would be trivial, especially if you made the rivets out of the same alloy as the blade. It's actually also quite normal now even for things made out of all one material to use structural adhesives (usually polyurethane, but not always) to bond pieces together that could be joined with another method like welding or clinching, just because it's cheaper.

    • Epoxy resin is lighter and stiffer than aluminium, which seem to me important properties for gigantic blades hanging from a single point and submitted to large forces. But you are right that if epoxy landfills become a problem, we might have to ask them to design the windmills in another material.

    • Probably because aluminum work hardens and becomes brittle. I expect that the vibration forces on a wind turbine blade would rapidly degrade the aluminum until a (spectacular) materials failure occurred.

      • because aluminum work hardens and becomes brittle

        You write this as if epoxy-carbon fibre composite materials don't also "work harden and become brittle". They do, but at different rates and with a more graceful degradation of properties with time.

        The short version is that in composite materials cracks deflect along fibres, which retain their intrinsic strength, then stop ; while in metals (and other crystalline materials) the cracks go zig-zagging along grain boundaries more-or less following (and accentua

  • Isn't step 1, after finding that companies won't gobble them up because they're 'worth something' offering them to Universities and Hackerspaces? I know *I* haven't heard of any up for grabs and I know at least six people that'd take 10 or 20 just because that's how they are . . .

    I know for CERTAIN I have't seen anyone try to build a house or a building out of these . . . so stop pretending like we've explored options.

    • See my comment upthread about fire resistance certification.

      If you're building a premises for single user occupation, and can persuade that user to take on all risks consequent on materials, methods of construction etc ... you might be able to get them used for single one-off builds. By definition, you're talking about housing the 1%, not the 99%, and that's probably not going to be a big enough market to provide a reliable disposal route. You might get rid of the occasional blade like this, but not the ot

  • Many sail and powerboats are made from epoxy resin fiberglass which this would work for. I wonder if there is a way to do it for polyester resin fiberglass hulls.

  • Wind turbines filling up our landfills is among the least of our concerns. Neither is used fuel(aka nuclear waste) which has caused zero deaths ever.
  • Several posts over the last year about how recycling plastic is a myth. And here comes the wind industry to say "we can recycle our epoxy resin to avoid blades piling up in landfills". Every other producer in existence just shrugs.

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