Blade remarketing

[k-289]

Interesting  read   on  wind  tower  blades  -   -   -

HINT  - Saw  in  half  links ,  then  transport  to  feedlot for  either  shade  or  windbreak  -  -  -

Or  would - might,  that  eliminate  the  legal  wrangling  proce$$  - ?   

[rickgthf]

The blades are most likely made of glass fiber and polymerized polyester resin, and it's not as if people don't dispose of old fiberglass items in landfills all the time.  For that matter, how many old fiberglass boats are disposed of every year, with the exception of all those that are dragged out on the lake and sunk, that is.

  Chop them into pieces and put them in the landfill! All this fuss is just anti-renewable reactionary-ism and NIMBY-ism.  The people in Iowa need to worry about the real environmental and health hazards from all those hog barns & billions of gallons of hog manure and stop obsessing about a few inert wind turbine blades.

[sw363535]

A bit distorted Rick.  But you do bring up a point. The production costs and environmental cost of wind elec. Is very understated and needs considered.  And in the Midwest why bury something that won’t decompose?  Burn it and use ashes fertility.  We insanely try to impose the same solution on very different conditions and locations.  But someone who does not understand the benefit of hog manure is not going to understand the problems of burying non decomposing concrete, plastics, etc.  compare the tons of concrete perminantly buried under every mill.

[Hobbyfarmer]

Ricky's ignorance is showing.

He obviously has NO concept of the number of these things and space requirements.

Drive interstate 35 north of Ames Iowa. North a little ways is a collection of those things most cut into sections for better stacking. East side of hwy south side of crossroad.

If they would burn they should be put through a power plant as a small % of the feedstock.

The leach fluid from a landfill full of them would turn into a super fund site. 

Anybody ever hear the term "unintended consequences"?

Or how about

"not thourghly thought through"?

He should see these things being hauled down the road and stand up close to one. 

[erikjohnson61y]

Burn fiberglass????  Ain't happenin'.

A lot of fly ash from coal plants has been used as filler/binder in concrete (worked on a foundation project myself where it was used).  Grinding them up seems a good option if you can control the dust.  Using the grindings as filler in concrete seems like a good way to get rid of it, IF it works like fly ash and doesn't weaken the concrete.  Greens will like that because cement is a large producer of CO2, and this might displace some of that.

But it is true that wind power requires a lot of fossil fuels to get going. That's a lot of steel that requires a lot of oil and coal to mine and refine into steel and fabricate into tower sections. A Lot of diesel to transport the sections to the site, and erect them, to say nothing of the steel and oil required to make the trucks and cranes. There are 450" cubic yards of concrete in the gravity base for each tower, plus many truckloads of rebar, and a lot of copper and aluminum for the gathering systems and transmission line to the tie-in point. The fact that, once they're up and running, they use no fuel is by then a minor benefit.  

[roarintiger1]

I’ve often wondered why these massive windmills have to be so large? It seems to me that smaller versions would be cheaper to build, potentially more efficient, and easier to dispose of. 

[Hobbyfarmer]

they are placed on the best soil in this state.

Pain to farm around thrm and the all weather road to each and every one of them.

If they had 4 to 6 littler ones it would effectively help crop prices with the removal of that much more class A crop ground.

Palm Springs California area has had hundreds of the first smaller ones for 40 years. Effectively covering the valley floor in areas.

[k-289]

Also , Tehachapi  Pass  California , north of Los Angeles ,   4500+  turbines  -  -  -

120  ft.  blade disposal - repurpose ,  need$  to  be  complicated of  cour$e , much  like  the  seed  corn  deal  at  Mead  Nebraska  or  salt  water disposal   (SWD)  in  oil  field  extraction  -  -  -

Quick  &  Convenient  can  overrule  commonsense  when  a  CRI$I$  appears , ( never let one go to waste ) , and  of  course  like  Mead , ignoring  the  issue  and  UT - OH  - - -    

[erikjohnson61y]

Tiger - Height matters most for these wind towers. The higher you get, the more consistent the wind, and the less stress on the blades. (When the blade dips down to the bottom of it's cycle, often the wind is different than that experienced by the other to blades that are up in the consistent wind. They feather the blades somewhat to compensate, but it still puts a torque on the hub bearings).

In my area there are two wind farms, one built in 2014 and one completed in 2020. The older one is 120MW and 70 towers, the newer one is 218MW and 57 towers. The newer ones are 85 feet taller than the older ones, and the blades turn more slowly (long blades generate more torque, plus better transmissions to generate more useful electricity). The company that developed our second one worked with landowners and operators to make the access roads as unintrusive to farming operations as possible, although I understand not all wind developers do that. Each tower in the second farm costs 50% more than the towers in the first farm, but produce more than twice as much electricity.

In Altamont Pass in California, they are replacing over 2000 1970's vintage towers with new ones, and each new tower replaces 23 of the older ones, but generates the same amount of electricity.  Fewer towers means fewer blades to recycle, less copper in the gathering systems, and far fewer plus slower rotating blades than pose far less danger to birds.   

[roarintiger1]

Yeah.......I can see the birds trying to fly through these blades.......about like people putting a golf ball through the windmill on the putt putt course.