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Comment by Bric3d | Hacker News Reader

From what I understood the main ecological issue with wind turbine are more due to the blades than the tower, I wonder if they're doing something on that side.

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Those blades are a major engineering challenge. Have a friend who's a materials scientist who works on those blades. Those things experience crazy stresses because they're so huge. Failures can be pretty catastrophic. I don't think the ecological issue with those blades is all that relevant given the huge ecological benefits of wind power over any other form of electricity generation.

Any? Solar and nuclear would like a word :P

That feels like a disingenuous take. If the composites in wind turbine blades are an environmental problem, then so is nuclear waste and so are the semiconductors in solar panels.

Wind turbines spread microplastics always. Coal spread radioactivity and CO2 always. Nuclear spreads radioactivity very rarely. The semiconductors are just rocks basically so not a problem (there are other components that might be, but the semiconductors certainly isn't the issue).

Solar actually has over twice the footprint of onshore wind, considering the energy needed to produce the panels, but it's irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, as all those mentioned sources, if they were to form the majority of the mix, would make electricity a much smaller chunk of the overall footprint than, say, food.

In 2024 France electricity was responsible for an equivalent of 16.1Mt of CO2 - largely due to gas peaker plants, which together contributed to a single digit percentage of overall electricity consumption.

That's 235kg of CO2 per person, or 2.5-7.5kg of beef in terms of environmental impact.

I agree on solar and that is hypothetically true of nuclear. But in reality nuclear industry has had far less ecological benefit than the wind industry.

I think your math is wrong there. Look at France and compare it to Germany. "Less ecological benefit" in your statement would mean that taking the entire country of France away from CO2 emissions (for decades now!) is less important than the CO2 reductions from wind turbines (globally?). You probably used the wrong tense "has had".

i partly agree, but the fact that those blades cant even be recycled [0] but are instead dug down in the ground after use will probably be an ecological issue relatively soon.

edit: [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb...

felt like i read that article yesterday. 5 years ago, wow. has any progress been made there?

There has been some but everything isn't fully scaled up yet.

https://www.energy.gov/eere/wind/articles/carbon-rivers-make...

Many are now burnt in cement kilns.

A fair part of new blade models are recyclable (check RecyclableBlade, ZEBRA, PECAN...).

Research may even enable to somewhat recycle old ones: https://www.offshorewind.biz/2023/02/08/newly-discovered-che...

there are a couple of catastrophic failure modes of those blades and it's some pretty insane footage. The one I saw I believe failed because the brake failed in a big wind storm

It's a relatively very minor challenge compared to burning massive amounts of gas, coal or oil for the same energy of the blades over the lifetime. The big picture is that wind turbines are a massive improvement over that.

There's a very minor challenge (compared to decades of coal/gas related emissions) of what happens to the blades after their useful life ends. Mostly you are just putting something that doesn't naturally degrade very well in a landfill where it sits and doesn't degrade very well. It might be leaking some toxic stuff slowly over a very long time. Compared to all absolutely massive amounts of other stuff we dump in landfills, what happens to the blades is probably not the most urgent thing to tackle from an ecological point of view.

Of course, windmill construction at scale involves a lot of steel, concrete, and blades. So if would can do the same job and perform well, that's still interesting to do. We take something that's already amazingly good and make it even better.

Check out these guys! https://voodin-blades.com/

We're officially back to classic wooden windmills.

Maybe they can use cross-laminated wood or the compressed wood that was on hacker news the other day.

If you go smaller you can use wood for the blades too. Smaller doesn't scale as well, but if you design and build them right you can still get more energy than it takes to produce them: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2019/06/reinventing-the-sm...

It's that, and the tower's concrete base (which is huge, and virtually indestructible, which means no-one is going to remove it. It'll stay in the ground forever, essentially sealing it (even if there is a meter of dirt covering it). See [1] for a picture to understand the dimensions:

[1] https://www.sserenewables.com/news-and-views/2021/09/concret...

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