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Comment by asien | Hacker News Reader

What I’m more worry about those Renewables stuff is their ressource footprint , when you look at how much « rare earth » « composite » material is needed to build just one its seems like a nonsense to use wind their are many documentaries on this topic. Today the vast majority of those turbines are not recycled.

On top of that wind being intermittent you need gas power plant to provide.

France power provider RTE estimated that if the country moved to 100% renewable it would need 12 times its gas capacity or 10% of ALL lithium available on earth for battery.

1st gen renewable are far from a panacea.

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Wind turbines take less than a year to become CO2 neutral - generating enough electricity to offset the embodied CO2 used to produce, transport and construct the turbine.

https://www.newscientist.com/lastword/mg24332461-400-what-is...

This will likely go down over time though, as steel and concrete (which are both very much recyclable today) are big parts of wind turbines so as those become "greener" so will the wind turbines.

Yes the blades are not currently recycled, but like most things, this is because it's cheaper to produce new than to recycle. If it became economically viable or government's mandated it, then it would happen. There are already some processes to recycle glass fibre composites:

https://www.materialstoday.com/carbon-fiber/features/recycli...

You mean comparing the CO2 emitted by gas or coal?

Well, recycling that stuff is a challenge, for sure. But is it unrealistic to expect that they _can_ be recycled?

Also, what about wind turbines that use less/almost no rare-earth materials? Could these be produced at sub-optimal efficiency but still be viable?

The great majority of installed wind turbines are already built using electromagnets. Only a minority of turbines use rare earth permanent magnets. Permanent magnet designs cost more but are lower maintenance, so they are mostly used offshore where maintenance is more costly.

> Today the vast majority of those turbines are not recycled.

I really doubt this is true in any meaningful sense. First of all, I'd expect the majority of all turbines ever produced to still be in their useful service life. Second, many of the materials are valuable as scrap. It would be blatantly idiotic to just destroy and bury these materials, even if your goal is to spite environmentalists. Third, even the unsubsidized cost of wind turbines is not that high. These materials don't just appear out of thin air, they're accounted for in the costs.

You would be very wrong unfortunately. There’s currently no way to recycle or reuse the blades and it’s a big problem that nobody seems to care about.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb... “Companies are searching for ways to deal with the tens of thousands of blades that have reached the end of their lives.”

In Sweden we are making wind power company owners very rich with heavily subsidies, wind power is far from cost effective and at least here it’s not even close to covering its own.

> Wind power is carbon-free and about 85% of turbine components, including steel, copper wire, electronics and gearing can be recycled or reused.

That’s a far cry from “no way”.

The problem is today no industrial bother recycling them , it’s just cheaper to buy new material.

Those 85% are actually 15% in effective.

Surely copper at least is worth recycling?

The materials are indeed worth recycling but the process is just too expensive and complicated.

Best examples would be devices like phones/microwave/tv they contain lots of those rare materials.

Industrial simply prefer to sell junks for cheap in bulk to the African continent where very poor people burn those junks to extract the rare minerals.

It’s not as simple as « 100% recyclable = Always Recycled »

Except people do care and are looking for solutions. Just Google turbine blade recycling to see. Also, storing some inert waste seems pretty mild as an environmental issue.

> There’s currently no way to recycle or reuse the blades and it’s a big problem that nobody seems to care about

The wind power industry cares and is actively asking for political incentives to change this: https://windeurope.org/newsroom/press-releases/wind-industry...

The industry needs political incentives to even exist and now they want incentives to fix the problem the incentives created. Why don’t we just agree on state financed and owned wind power and be done with it instead of feeding the middlemen.

And it begs the question, the waste was a known factor before even starting building turbines, why start asking for this now instead of twenty years ago. To me it feels very much like a problem once wanted to be swept under the rug now becoming too much to handle.

Because markets carry useful signals. Part of the move to decarbonised energy is creating the free economic systems which support it.

I feel like your argument is the kind that sounds sort of intuitive in isolation, but is nonsensical in context.

How much of the inputs into fossil fuel generators are recycled? Massively more coal, gas, oil etc. is consumed than the amount of wind turbine blades that will go to landfill. Then there’s the byproducts - in Australia, coal ash is literally 22% of all waste generated across the whole country per year. It just goes to landfill!

That is the typical “two wrongs make a right” argument, fossil fuels being bad makes it ok for wind turbines to generate land fill too.l And I answered a statement about recycling of turbines, nothing more.

No it's a typical "this alternative is better even though it is not a panacea" argument. Nobody argues that it's good that wind turbines produce waste. It's just that the problems caused by wind turbine waste are absolutely trivial compared to climate change.

My point is that the people who suddenly seem very worried that wind turbines and other renewables produce a small amount of waste don't seem to care about the fact that fossil fuels produce a huge amount of waste (in addition to the GHG emissions). Same issue as being very worried about renewables using resources (some steel, etc.) when not caring about the huge amounts of resources (especially including the fuel itself!) consumed by fossil fuels.

>wind power is far from cost effective and at least here it’s not even close to covering its own.

This is certainly not universally true...for example: https://www.government.nl/latest/news/2019/07/10/vattenfall-...

Today most of wind turbine blades get literally buried in specialized landfills [0]. Companies which produce them promise to boost recycling rate in a decade or so, but right now it's just yet another externality. Proper recycling simply costs more and it's not given that there is enough capacity for materials produced from recycled blades (you can find a similar story with plastic recycling).

[0]: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8294057/Hundreds-no...

There are no rare materials used in the blades.

That being said, yes, the recycling (and presumably also the environmental impact while they are running and constantly weathered) of these composites remains problematic. But they don't end up in land fills in Germany, at least:

https://www.energieagentur.nrw/blogs/erneuerbare/beitraege/r...

The post I replied to implied metals and rare earth materials were being thrown away. That is the part I doubt.

For materials like the blades, we need to compare this to alternatives. The lack of recycling may be insignificant compared to the amount of materials consumed by non-renewable power sources (e.g. coal, oil), purely in terms of environmental impact from mining the materials, let alone GHG emissions.

Wind turbine have a recommended life time of 20 to 25 years , earlier turbines go even lower to just 15 years.

I guess one solution is smart devices and processess that can be optimized to load whwn there is peak power.

Some industrial processess, such as smelting, crushing, etc can be incentivized to do that.

At domestic levels, its more difficult

One easy one is charging electric cars. If they can be plugged in both at work and at home, there's a huge opportunity to charge when there's excess production.

I can imagine settings where you can define when to charge e.g. "Charge to 20%, then only at peak excess energy times", like how people set the dryer to go overnight when there's excess energy

>> At domestic levels, its more difficult

Not sure if this is correct. Once power cost is reduced, the cost of investing equipment dominates still further. Industrial processes are designed to operate 24/7 and when they don't, they are uneconomic.

Domestic power consumption is never 24/7 on any major device and there is some discretion over scheduling. Even fridge/freezer has some flexibility

Fossil fuel exhaust in the atmosphere? good

Inert wind turbines in the ground? bad

> material is needed to build just one its seems like a nonsense to use wind their are many documentaries on this topic.

[citation needed], careful you're not falling for a disinformation campaign.

The counter argument is clearly made here: https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2021/06/whats-the-carbon-...

OP is referring to pollution in the form of toxic metals and things like that, your link only refers to the co2. Lithium ion batteries don’t grow on trees…

12 times its gas capacity doesn't sound like very much. France doesn't have a lot of gas capacity today afaik.

I'm sure the provider isn't interested in anything but the scientific truth here.

France runs mostly on nuclear, producing less carbon and more energy for less money than Germany which tried (and failed) to move its grid to solar and wind

Germany has not failed to move the grid to solar and wind, the process is still ongoing.

France does run mostly on nuclear, but the less money claim needs some serious evidence. The reason why France can export energy more cheaply is because the cost of nuclear is pretty much all capex, so now that they have their plants it makes sense to constantly (nuclear plants can't easily be adjusted to load) run them at a high output and export excess energy. However, the overall cost is very likely much higher (the main reason why nobody wants to build new nuclear plants). France nuclear industry was (and still is?) heavily subsidised because nuclear capability (in particular military) is regarded of strategic importance.

Aren't renewables heavily subsidised?

The LCOE of unsubsidized newbuilt renewables are currently getting below the marginal cost of existing nuclear and fossil infrastructure.

https://www.lazard.com/media/451446/grphx_lcoe-07-07.jpg

From:

https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...

This assumes that for some reason you don’t need electricity at night

It also assumes that your fossil power plants are free.

So you're also being downvoted for raising a good question.

Nuclear is much greener that renewables, nuclear emits less CO2 per watt.

Building a wind turbine on a large floor of concrete, building batteries and solar panels all the material that comes with it...

Fossil fuel benefits from renewables.

One similar thing regarding both nuclear and wind power plants is no one wants one in their backyard.

I'd love to have a nuclear plant in my backyard.

Also it might be a cloudy area.

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