One Thing I Have Never Been Convinced About,

is wind turbines,

and how cheaply they make electricity 24/7, and like the batteries in all electric cars, how in an environmentally friendly way can you get rid of them once their life is over? this is the untalked about part of wind farms, the above photograph is of the municipal landfill in Casper, Wyoming, which is the final resting place of 870 blades whose days making renewable energy have come to end, photographer: Benjamin Rasmussen for Bloomberg Green, tens of thousands of aging blades are coming down from steel towers around the world and most have nowhere to go but landfills, I thought we were supposed to be cutting down on landfill waste, it seems the wind farm industry is making more! in the U.S. alone, about 8,000 blades will be removed in each of the next four years, here at home in Europe, which has been dealing with the problem longer, has about 3,800 coming down annually through at least 2022, according to BloombergNEF, and it is going to get worse, most were built more than a decade ago, when installations were less than a fifth of what they are now, the fact is that wind power is carbon-free and about 85% of turbine components, including steel, copper wire, electronics and gearing can be recycled or reused, but, and it is a big but, the fiberglass blades remain difficult to dispose of, with some as long as a football field, big rigs can only carry one at a time, making transportation costs prohibitive for long-distance hauls, so use more energy cutting them up, and then transport them to, you guessed it, a landfill site! there has been laboratory research into breaking the blades down, but the cost of heating the blades to the temperatures required is prohibitive, wind farms helping to fill landfill sites near you!