‘Green’ wind energy sending many giant blades to landfills

Wind turbines stand in a field, Friday, Feb. 2, 2018, near Northwood, Iowa. Critics are questioning how “green” the technology can be if turbines’ blades can’t be recycled but instead have to be disposed of in a landfill.(AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

By DONNELLE ELLER
The Des Moines Register

WALNUT, Iowa (AP) — At a western Iowa wind farm, a demolition crew saws through red slashes marked on 120-foot turbine blades, cutting them into thirds before stuffing the thinnest piece inside a hollow cavity in the turbines’ bases, giving workers room to load more blades onto a flatbed trailer.

The work is part of MidAmerican Energy’s attempt to “repower” nearly 110 turbines, giving existing towers longer blades, new hubs and refurbished generators. When the work is done, the wind farm will have increased its energy output by nearly 20%, MidAmerican says.

But the work for Iowa’s growing wind industry, which is already among the largest in the country, is leading to some unexpected difficulties.

MidAmerican’s retired blades, destined for the Butler County Landfill near David City, Nebraska, about 130 miles away, are among the hundreds that will land in dumps throughout Iowa and the country. Critics of wind energy say the blades’ march to a landfill weakens the industry’s claim that it’s a “green” source of energy.

“This clean, green energy is not so clean and not so green,” says Julie Kuntz, who opposes a Worth County wind project. “It’s just more waste going in our landfills.”

Daniel Laird, a U.S. Department of Energy researcher, told The Des Moines Register that most of a turbine can be recycled, including “a lot of metal — steel and copper.”

He acknowledges, though, that disposing of the blades is difficult. Wind-energy generation, now topping 100 gigawatts nationally, will create 1 million tons of fiberglass and other composite waste, said Laird, director of the National Wind Technology Center at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado.

“The scale of the issue is quite large,” said Laird, whose group is working to develop new blade materials that will enable reuse. “It’s quite a bit of material. And it’s a larger sustainability issue. We would like everything that’s manufactured to be reusable or recyclable.”

The needed disposal of turbine blades will most likely take years in Iowa. Large, investor-owned Iowa utilities are investing heavily in wind energy as well as replacing blades to make old turbines last longer.

MidAmerican will have spent $11.6 billion on wind from 2004 through this year, and Alliant Energy is spending $2.4 billion to build wind farms in Iowa.

Iowa had 5,073 turbines last year, seven times more than in 2004, data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration show.

Kerri Johannsen, the Iowa Environmental Council energy program director, said more recycling proposals are needed. But, she added, that’s no reason to “turn away from wind energy — a solution that can help mitigate the most dangerous threats from climate change.”

With older wind farms being brought up to date, Iowa landfills are just beginning to accept unwanted blades for disposal.

Landfill operators thought the composite blades, cut in 40-foot or larger sections, could be readily crushed and compacted. “But blades are so strong — because they need to be strong to do their job — they just don’t break,” said Amie Davidson, a solid-waste supervisor at the Iowa Department of Natural Resources.

“Sometimes pieces fly off and damage equipment” in the compacting process, she said. “Landfills are really struggling to manage them, and they just decide they can’t accept them.”

So far, only one landfill in north Iowa is taking the blades; others are still considering whether they will accept them.

Bill Rowland, president of the Iowa Society of Solid Waste Operations, said he’s unsure “we as a society” considered what would happen to the blades as older turbines are repowered.

“There wasn’t a plan in place to say, ‘How are we going to recycle these?’ ‘How are we going to reduce the impact on landfills?'” said Rowland, director of the Landfill of North Iowa near Clear Lake.

“One way or another, we have to deal with it as a state. They’ve been promoted. They’ve been built,” he said. “In our opinion, there needs to be a way to handle the waste that’s derived from them.”

The difficulty in reusing blades adds to the complaints opponents make against wind energy. Some who live near the turbines complain that low-frequency noise and light flickering caused by the the blades make them ill. And the spinning blades can kill migrating birds and bats.

Blade disposal is “just one of many factors we’re concerned about,” said Kuntz, the Worth County wind-farm opponent.

Des Moines-based MidAmerican, which began building its own wind farm in 2004, said it relies on wind-turbine manufacturers — who then hire contractors — to decide how best to dispose of old blades, hubs and electronics.

When it started investing in wind, the utility believed a blade-recycling option would emerge. “Thus far, it hasn’t,” said Geoff Greenwood, a spokesman for MidAmerican, adding that the company is talking with other wind developers that may be interested in using the blades for their own projects.

In South Dakota, Donny Kuper, superintendent of the Sioux Falls Sanitary Landfill, said the landfill set new requirements for accepting turbine blades after studying how much space 100 blades from an Iowa wind farm took up.

Amid concerns that taking in the massive pieces could result in the landfill being closed sooner than expected, Kuper said the plan now is to have the blades cut up in small pieces so that they can be compacted like other waste.

That should make it easier and safer for Kuper’s crew to manage the blades, one of which got caught in a 120,000-pound compactor wheel. It flew up and broke the machine’s windshield, idling the $900,000 piece of equipment for a week.

“There’s definitely risk involved,” Kuper said. “The blades themselves are pretty slick, so compactors can get on top of a blade and slip off. It’s not happened to us, but I’ve heard it happened in other landfills, where a compactor has tipped over.”

The Waste Management center near Lake Mills in north Iowa is accepting the blades, but its workers are “shearing” them — or cutting them into smaller pieces, said Julie Ketchum, a Waste Management spokeswoman.

The center takes in about six blades a day, or the equivalent of two wind turbines, she said.

Davidson at the DNR said other landfills are discussing whether they can accept the blades. One of the questions that has emerged is who should be responsible for cutting the turbines into smaller pieces, she said.

“We can’t make anybody take a waste,” so it’s up to individual landfills to decide if they will accept blades, she said.

Davidson said she’s unsure whether many recycling options are available. Laird at the DOE said most uses involve cutting up the material and using the pieces in other products. But it’s still unclear whether that’s financially viable over the long term.

Global Fiberglass Solutions of Bothell, Washington, says it recycles wind turbines, planes, boats and other fiberglass products in Newton, Iowa, and Sweetwater, Texas. The company didn’t return calls asking for more information, but says on its website it uses recycled fiberglass to make other products.

The trouble with recycling blades, Laird said, is that there is no easy way to separate the materials used to make them.

Using food analogies, he said some materials in the blades are like a fried egg. Once they’re cooked, they can’t be changed. If those materials were more like chocolate, they could be melted, reformed and used to make something else.

His team is working to see if blades can be manufactured differently, maintaining their toughness while allowing for reuse when they’ve done their job. The blades must be able to last 30 years under stressful conditions.

“The blade manufacturing process is sensitive to changes,” Laird said. “It could throw off the whole manufacturing process.”

MidAmerican’s Greenwood says the utility plans to spend $2.3 billion to repower 1,215 turbines throughout the state through 2022.

Consumers will pay none of the wind costs, Greenwood said. In fact, MidAmerican has said the utility will receive about $10 billion in federal production tax credits for the investment, covering the capital costs needed to build the wind farms.

MidAmerican Energy has set a goal to generate as much energy from wind as its 770,000 Iowa electric customers use over a year. So far, it’s reached about 50%.

Yet despite this big investment, coal is still Iowa’s largest source of energy to produce electricity, followed by wind and other renewable energy and natural gas. Iowa gets 34% of its electricity from wind, the second-largest proportion in the nation after Kansas at 36%.

Michael McCoy, executive director of the Metro Waste Authority in Des Moines, said Iowa needs to figure out how best to recycle the blades, given wind energy’s growing presence in Iowa.

“Whether it’s blades or tires, we’d rather see materials recycled,” McCoy said. “But you’ve got to have an end market for that.”