A 2017 Soothsaying Perspective on the Accumulation of Wind Turbine Blade Waste.

[NNadir]

The paper I'll discuss in this post is this one: Pu Liu, Claire Y. Barlow, Wind turbine blade waste in 2050, Waste Management, Volume 62, 2017, Pages 229-240

Waste Management is not a journal I read regularly, but from time to time I find myself in it, usually in connection with following citations, occasionally from the use of a search engine. This paper, irrespective of the impact factor of the journal itself, according to Google Scholar has been cited 564 times. I guess it gets under people's skin.

The wind industry is useless, at least if the goal is to address the ongoing collapse of the planetary atmosphere: It is wholly dependent on access to dangerous fossil fuels. It has done nothing, absolutely nothing, to slow climate change: In the period during which it soaked up trillions of dollars, the degradation of the planetary atmosphere has accelerated.

Well, let's see how the soothsaying about wind turbines is playing out.

From the paper's introduction:

Wind energy has become one of the most promising renewable energy sources over the last two decades with the installed capacity increasing from 7600 MW in 1998 to 364,270 MW in 2014 (GWEC, 2015). The capacity is expected to continue to increase, although rates may vary in different geographical areas. The Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) predicts that the global annual growth rate of wind power will exceed 12% between 2013 and 2018 (GWEC, 2014b). The European Wind Energy Association (EWEA) predicts that by 2020 there will be 192 GW of wind capacity supplying 14.9% of global electricity in 2020 (EWEA, 2014). The International Energy Association (IEA) estimates that 15–18% of global electricity will be produced from wind energy in 2050 (IEA, 2011). Despite these disparities, all the predictions indicate that wind energy will continue to develop rapidly over the next decade.

I added the bold: So called "renewable energy" is very good at promising, very poor at delivering. The usual misrepresentations associated with wind and solar are all present in this introduction, "percent talk," the use of peak power units of capacity, Megawatts, while ignoring the all important point of capacity utilization, for wind, generally less than 30%, and so on.

The next paragraph is a little dose of reality about how "green" the useless wind industry actually is, doing so in terms of material costs:

Although wind energy is often claimed to provide clean renewable energy without any emissions during operation (U.S. Department of Energy, 2015), a detailed ecological study may indicate otherwise even for this stage. The manufacture stage is energy-intensive and is associated with a range of chemical usage (Song et al., 2009). Disposal at end-of-life must also be considered (Ortegon et al., 2012, Pickering, 2013, Job, 2014). A typical wind turbine (WT) has a foundation, a tower, a nacelle and three blades. The foundation is made from concrete; the tower is made from steel or concrete; the nacelle is made mainly from steel and copper; the blades are made from composite materials (Vestas, 2006, Tremeac and Meunier, 2009, Guezuraga et al., 2012). Considering these materials only, concrete and composites are the most environmentally problematic at end-of-life, since there are currently no established industrial recycling routes for them (Pimenta and Pinho, 2011, Job, 2013). Composite materials are energy intensive to manufacture and some of the material has high value, which means they have strong recycling potential in terms of both environmental and economic prospects (Shuaib et al., 2015). This study focuses on the composite component of wind turbine blades, looking at the waste inventory of all stages of their lifecycle. Composites account for more than 90% of the weight of WT blades (Liu and Barlow, 2016b). At present, most of the blades are made from polymer composite reinforced with mainly glass fibre, some carbon fibre and the hybrid combination of glass fibre and carbon fibre (Collier and Ashwill, 2011). High-grade epoxy and polyester are the mainstream resins used. Commonly adopted manufacturing processes use Pre-impregnated fabric (Prepreg) and Vacuum assisted resin transfer molding (VARTM) (Gurit Composites, 2009). It is recognised that the materials and manufacturing techniques will evolve over time, but predictions vary. Some predict that the proportion of carbon fibre will increase (NEEDS, 2008, McKenna et al., 2016) and will lead to more serious environmental impact from blade (Liu and Barlow, 2016a). However, current trends have provided no clear support for this trajectory, so it may be that manufacturers are impeded by the high cost of carbon fibre (Liu, 2016)...

"High grade epoxy" and polyester, are both petroleum products, and thus further indicate the dependence of so called "renewable energy" on dangerous fossil fuels, beyond the well known connection relating to the lack of reliability.

Some graphics from the text tell the story pretty well:





















From the papers conclusion:

This paper has systematically analysed and predicted the amount of global wind turbine blade waste that will be produced up to 2050 using the best available data from wind energy associations and blade manufacturers. Manufacturing waste, service waste and end-of-life waste are the three major sources of blade waste. Over the lifetime of the turbine, waste generated during manufacturing and service adds between 16% and 45% of the mass of the wind turbine blades. Sensitivity analysis of the contributing factors reveals the most significant elements and provides insight into where the wastes could be minimised. The balance between the waste generated by the different contributing factors changes over time. Manufacturing and service waste are currently the largest contributors, but end-of-life waste is increasing rapidly and is projected to equal manufacturing and service waste in 2029. The waste stream after this time is dominated by the end-of-life blades which will become the biggest problem. The results show that the end-of-life waste stream will annually generate more than 2 Mt in 2050 and cumulative blade waste in 2050 will lie between 21.4 Mt and 69.4 Mt with the most probable waste level being 43.4 Mt. Europe will face the problem first and ultimately China will have the largest waste inventory.

Aren't we nice people, leaving all future generations with lots and lots and lots of landfills to service our absurd short term affectations? Of course, turbine blade waste is trivial if one considers that because the wind industry and the solar industry are useless in addressing the collapse of the planetary atmosphere, we are leaving them an intractable and very dangerous waste dump of an atmosphere.

History will not forgive us, nor should it.

Have a nice weekend.