Why Did We Wait So Long for Wind Power? | Hacker News Reader

Why Did We Wait So Long for Wind Power?

construction-physics.com

28 pointschautumn10 comments

A bunch of academic hippies were working on windmill power in the Netherlands in the 1970s. But with cheap and unlimited LNG it was considered a technical curiosity.

Smart people did predict that gas would eventually run out but by then the country was supposed to have a dozen nuclear reactors like Japan. Now we can't even build one- and it's not even because of the 40 billion € cost but because of bureaucracy and NIMBYism.

The best thing about wind turbines in the North Sea? Nobody lives there.

I remember an uproar about building a nuclear reactor here in Canada because of a predicted 27 billion dollar cost. 40 billion euros?!

If it's going to be like this then I think net 0 requires a different form of government or for private power generation. There is no reason for a nuclear reactor to cost more than 10 billion US.

Those hippies didn't consider the decommission process of wind turbines. Drove past several farms during my holiday and there were a staggering number of turbines that were either not turning or turning at a fraction of the speed of their peers. I do worry what we are going to do with all the failed gearboxes and blades :\

The gearboxes are recyclable, the blades can be buried in a landfill or shredded into fine material to mix in with concrete.

It's really a non-issue compared to burning the remainder of fossil fuels (everything still buried).

It's dumb and a reflection of our business and regulatory environment that it's cheaper/better to invest labor and energy to shred something like blades and columns than to simply truck them away in whole or in part and then use them for other things.

We're basically talking about huge glass reinforced resin cylinders and non-flat sheets here. I can think of tons of potential uses at the right price.

About the only thing I agree with you in terms of repurposability would be the vertical column. And even then, you have to find the right buyer. For everything else, my intuition is the shredding it down for recycling is by far easier than repurposing. I haven't done any math on it though.

I'm sure if you filled a field full of 8.5 x 20/30/40ft slices of blade someone would buy them for something. Interleaved and stuck in the ground as a retaining wall or similar seems like a fairly obvious choice.

Any screeching about quality or defects can pretty much be overcome by just using more since they're waste after all.

Decommissioned blades are probably not that useful as raw material. What use could you have for a randomly curved segment of carbon fiber or fiberglass resin which has already been weathered and worn down for years?

You can't use the entire blade: for one they're ridiculously huge and have a very inconvenient shape. You'd have to hire people to cut them up, test each segment for defects, and somehow find buyers for randomly shaped offcuts. It'd probably cost a lot more than grinding them up into powders that already have commercial use.

No one would want the used sections. They're pre-damaged and would come at the same or higher cost than new. At the same time, new material gives you the choice over size and shape. I don't see it as a really practical solution.

Some things just can't be reused, so we have to break it back down to raw materials and recycle it. That's about the best you can expect from something intended to be a consumable replacement part.

>I do worry what we are going to do with all the failed gearboxes and blades

There are three companies I'm aware of in the United States who have commercialized, and are, today, right now, recycling turbine blades.

Additionally, there are multiple startups in both the US and Europe who have developed more easily recyclable blades and those are starting to be deployed.

Blade lifecycle is a solvable problem.

The steel in the gearboxes is a problem that solves itself.

Part 2 which is more about the economics and engineering is here https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-did-we-wait-so-lo...

and Part 3 about offshore here https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-did-we-wait-so-lo...

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