The average lifespan of a wind turbine blade is about 10 years, after which they need to be replaced. Apparently, we're just burying the used ones in landfills, like this one in Wyoming.
But those things are huge!
And the landfills accepting them are filling up too fast — much too quickly to be useful to the municipalities that also need the landfills for waste.
So where can we possibly store all these useless giant hunks of junk that the climate change advocates said we needed?
The folks in Wyoming have come up with a solution, and no, it's not the same way they dispose of dead horses. 👇
Their answer is all about returning the turbines back to the place from which they came.
Consider how much coal has to be mined to make a wind turbine. From start to finish, the production of a 1-Megawatt wind turbine requires 220 tonnes of coal to be mined and burned.
Taking all that coal out of the ground displaces a lot of earth and leaves these giant holes; holes that would be perfect for burying giant wind-turbine blades!
Wyoming House bill 89 would permit spent wind turbines to be buried in surface coal mines after the coal has been excavated, reducing the number that will be dumped in landfills.
'Repurposing these blades and towers as backfill as part of a reclamation plan was a novel answer for both the coal industry that needed backfill to accelerate final reclamation and for the wind industry that needed disposal answers,' former Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality Land Quality Division Administrator Kyle Wendtland, who led the state's rulemaking effort before moving on to the Wyoming Energy Authority, said in a prepared statement.
'Burying wind blades and other permitted wind energy materials can benefit coal mines by helping to speed up the reclamation process of backfilling pits. Mines are also allowed to charge a fee, with 25% of the receipts sent to the state. There are no extra charges for disposal.
'Not only can we handle Wyoming's waste stream from wind energy, we can handle a national level waste stream from wind energy and do it responsibly.'
Another day, another ingenious solution from the "green" energy folks!
P.S. Now check out our latest video 👇
