This is pretty interesting, because wind turbine blades are gargantuan pieces of equipment, some more than 400 feet in length, and on the low end, weighing 16 tons—but they’re apparently disappearing without a trace. Nobody seems to know where they’re going, and the CEOs of the industry aren’t talking.

From a report by Pat Maio at Cowboy State Daily:

Until a few years ago, it was common for old wind turbine blades to be discarded in local landfills. That’s not happening much anymore as landfills require them to be ground up ‘into really tiny pieces,’ which is expensive.

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These landfills either won’t accept the fiberglass blades or won’t return phone calls to discuss their policies. Utility companies won’t explain the working relationship with landfills and the extent of their recycler efforts.

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GE Vernova spokeswoman Treacy Reynolds declined to comment on her company’s blade recycling program. GE is a leading maker of wind turbines and has a strong presence in the blade market.

The story’s the same for a “spokesman for the billionaire Warren Buffett-owned utility giant PacifiCorp,” who “couldn’t comment”; neither could “a spokeswoman with Black Hills Energy.” Furthermore:

Cindie Langston, the solid waste division manager for the city of Casper, said that the Oil City will accept wind turbines for disposal, but ‘no wind farm operators have called us for disposal services’ in a few years.

How do you hide something like a wind turbine? Almost exactly one year ago, I wrote about the wind turbine industry turning the modest Texas town of Sweetwater into a giant landfill (out of sight out of mind right?), but where are they going now? Per the article, landfill supervisor Ryan Bechtold revealed that new rules for his landfill require the blade owners to grind the blade down into “4-inch chunks or less,” which is entirely “cost-prohibitive” meaning the blade owners aren’t seeking out Bechtold’s services. Or Cindie Langston’s apparently.

Are they sinking them to the bottom of the ocean?

Now, it seems as though this phenomenon is widespread, affecting both decommissioned turbine blades and destroyed ones:

If you ask Amy DiSibio, who summers on the island of Nantucket, about where wind blades are getting dumped, she’ll tell you that no one seems to care.

She’s been picking up scraps of blade debris along the shoreline of Nantucket since last month when a 351-foot-long offshore wind turbine dropped into the sea. The chards [sic] of fiberglass and other ‘car-sized’ pieces of debris have washed up on beaches all along the New England coastline.

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‘They’ve hauled six or seven truckloads of debris out of here,’ she said. ‘Where does it go?’

I wrote on that disaster here, which occurred a little over a month ago.

So why did the landfills change their policy on wind turbine blades? Well the space of course, but also… they have a negative impact on the stability of the ground, and are presumably quite dangerous:

After the Sioux City landfill conducted a study on the blades, it found problems with compaction of the dirt and shards of the blades.

Air pockets underground and shards of fiberglass lurking just below the soil’s surface? Big deal! Don’t you trust science? Aren’t you concerned about the environment and humanity?!

Image: ShellAsp, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, unaltered.