What happens to all the old wind turbines?
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
On top of this weight savings are a major goal so their designed to just barely work for a given lifespan. So, blades that where pulled from a working turbine are still really strong, they are simply more likely to fail at some unknown point in the future.
PS: Turbines from 20+ years ago are much smaller, but faced similar issues. For scale compare the turbine blade with cars in this shot and think this thing is rotating: https://www.technology.org/2018/03/23/here-is-the-worlds-lar...
Transmissions and bearings are more of a problem. "Turbine gearboxes are typically given a design life of 20 years, but few make it past the 10-year mark."[4]
[1] https://www.enr.com/articles/42352-are-four-wind-turbine-fai... [2] https://backend.orbit.dtu.dk/ws/portalfiles/portal/118222161... [3] http://fairwindres.com/wind-industry-maintenance/blade-repai... [4] https://www.windpowerengineering.com/wind-turbine-gearboxes-...
That's why the biggest and best are direct drive.
Now take that same material and give it a much shorter span/length, and a much lower loading, and fatigue becomes less of an issue.
I'm not sure what bridge they're talking about in specific but I don't see why they couldn't be beams for a pedestrian bridge providing. I bet the manufacturer has a lot of testing data too.
If it was easy and cheap to make them last longer someone would do so and win the market.
Many wind turbines were built with subsidies to run them for 25 years. As soon as that time is up, they may no longer be worth running, especially since in many places wholesale power costs have dropped due to other subsidised wind and solar.
Also, finding sites to build wind turbines is getting tricky - you need good wind, no complaining neighbours, good road and crane access, and a good grid connection. That usually makes existing wind turbine sites excellent candidates for building bigger better turbines which are 10x the size.
Study of fatigue damage in wind turbine blades “The inspection of damages detected in some blades of 300 kW wind turbines revealed that the nature of these damages was probably due to a fatigue mechanism. The causes that had originated the failure (superficial cracks, geometric concentrator, abrupt change of thickness) have been studied, verifying, by means of the simplified evaluation procedure of fatigue life of the “Germanischer Lloyd” (GL) standard, that these causes can explain the failure detected in the period of time in which it happened.“
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13506...
That said monitoring and inspection can maximize the lifespan of individual turbines even if nobody is aiming for 50+ year service life.
I wish more things were made to last. Imagine working in a 5000 year old skyscraper that's as good as the day it opened, or driving a 500 year old car that's as reliable as the day you purchased it.
Humanity's going to last a long, long time. Hopefully.
At least resources like wood and water are renewable. But oil and metal aren't. When we run out of oil, we can kiss plastics and cosmetics goodbye. As for metals, recycling scrap metal and asteroid mining are our only long term options.
Living in Europe and having ample opportunity to visit them, I'm always fascinated by the old cathedrals that just stand around in our city centers. I almost can't believe how people hundreds of years ago managed to erect these structures. And not only that but the level of detail and craftmanship that went into all of its components is mind-boggling. To me it also signifies a connection to previous generations which you don't often get anywhere else. Of course they are not nearly 5.000 years old, but it just sprang to my mind when I read this line.
And then, there are the aquaducts and water mills scattered all over the region (Austria). What an astonishing thing to see, still in operation, hundreds of years after they were built, water wheels pulling water up into the castle ..
That doesn't mean they were stupid or didn't have intimate knowledge of their craft.
In those days, models were built by the designers which were then given to the craftsmen to build. There's a museum in England which houses the ship models built by the naval architects to give to the ship builders. The models are exquisite.
And the technology of communicating to these craftsmen and artisans is another subject itself .. here in Vienna, we also have museums devoted to such things. I find it really fascinating personally.
Can you provide a link of which museum you're talking about specifically?
Just in case someone reading this happens to be living in Vienna... ;)
I'm also a big fan of the Deutsches Museum in Munich:
A bummer the Space pavilion is closed at the moment though. Definitely better to plan a visit to Munich when that re-opens again.
People love these old structures (as do I) and non-trivial effort is put into protecting and maintaining them.
For a famous example, there's the leaning tower of Pizza.
One simple example: reinforced concrete usually decays after a few decades. Without the rebars inside, we could make our concrete last much longer. But we'd lose out on the magic engineering properties of reinforced concrete.
Everyone who's already been tells me it's really impressive
Telemetry would be the first thing on the backports list before the car is deemed roadworthy again.
There are also many others in that space fixing old timers, or 'new' old timers, say from the 80ies or 90ies. Can all be had without telemetry. Are there regions who allow absolutely NO EXCEPTIONS to 'grandfathered in' cars?
Wouldn't that be so totalitarian?
Do you have an idea how big a ball of matter we are sitting on?
> At least resources like wood and water are renewable. But oil and metal aren't. When we run out of oil, we can kiss plastics and cosmetics goodbye.
Carbon and hydrogen and oxygen are plentiful. Oil is just convenient because it already combines them and also comes with a lot of easily usable energy.
But if you are willing to (or forced to), you can make plastics (or even oil or fuel) from scratch, you 'just' need to supply your own external energy. Nuclear or solar or wind etc will do just fine for that.
As an intermediate step, you can use coal as your raw material. Not as convenient as oil, but we have more reserves of it around the globe.
His variant of goldenrods were about 12% latex after some selective breeding.
I'd be curious what kind of plants we could engineer today to make rubber with. There's tons of stuff out there and yes we don't necessarily need oil or other resources if push comes to shove.
The world won't end if we ran out of (cheap) oil in the next few years. But productivity would take a bit of a hit for at least a while.
Wait, doesn't rotting mean it releases the CO2 stored in the wood? I would says that's an issue more than something inert.
Old fiberglass is full of cracks, scrapes, and holes.
It's repairable, but the repair is highly labour intensive, whereas making a new boat uses less labour.
Also, any repaired fiberglass item will always have a worse strength to weight ratio than a new item - you simply can't efficiently bond new to old fiberglass in a strong way.
The physics of insulators, like fiberglass batting. Basically, it works the same way as down feathers or fur. The material traps air into many, many somewhat separate pockets. This interrupts convective flows, which drastically slows down the rate at which heat can move through air. Since air is the opposite of dense, not much heat can be transmitted through air which does not move.
Fiberglass tiles aren't going to have the same insulating property, just because they're also fiberglass.
100m? For real?
> Burying them doesn't sound very green.
Why do I care if something doesn't sounds green? Tell me an actual consequence.
Of course, that doesn't mean the whole of society has to worry about it.
And in the worst case, we can just dump them on landfills until we know what to do with them.
Some of it has to do with the depth: most life is in the 0-40’ zone. And the oxygen drops off quite a bit, which inhibits oxidation (rust). There’s another wreck we dive at 40’ that’s barely recognizable due to corrosion and life. There’s an area that has coke bottles from 1945 (the glass is date-stamped) and they barely have anything growing on them.
If you dump fiberglass in shallow water, people are going to be pissed. If you dump fiberglass in deep water, it will likely not decompose for millennia. But it also won’t be a Mecca for perch and sharks like some make them out to be.
On other hand, how does blade-waste compare to energy- and non-energy- waste sources? Until that solution arrives:
" municipal and commercial dumps will take most of the waste, which the American Wind Energy Association in Washington says is safest and cheapest. 'Wind turbine blades at the end of their operational life are landfill-safe...' [The group] pointed to an Electric Power Research Institute study that estimates all blade waste through 2050 would equal roughly .015% of all the municipal solid waste going to landfills in 2015 alone."[0]
[0]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb...
Why? We're in no danger of running out of space, and they're not toxic.
But in this particular situation: a quarter-century-old turbine blade has paid for itself so many times over already that this is just not where we need to be spending out time worrying about efficiencies. Even if we just bury the things, wind power remains (by far!) the most environmentally beneficial choice for almost all electrical markets.
If they're blowing around in the wind or dumped in the waterways, sure. If they're buried, none I've heard of.
See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5373626 for example.
(In political practice, it seems easier to throw around subsidy dollars, alas.)
I think this entire article lost sight of the relevant scale, because blades are big compared to humans and energy (and the physical waste of displaced energy sources) is invisible.