I have been seeing a lot of chatter on LinkedIn specifically about how Wind Turbines are really not sustainable or have a higher carbon footprint than the electricity they generate would have, or just misinformation about whether or not they are dangerous. So, I thought I would at least attempt to set the record straight about these things. And I am not biased because I am in the wind turbine industry, and certainly not biased by the oil and gas industry. I am an engineer with several decades of experience who has worked in both the oil and gas industry and the renewable energy industry over the course of my career. My perspective is more at the 30,000 foot level with the engineering and scientific knowledge to be able to sort out reality from the noise for everyone.

The pictures you see are like the one above where it appears that the operator wasn’t paying attention to blade life they way they should have, or perhaps a windstorm came up that these blades couldn’t handle. In any case, this sort of thing is very rare in the wind turbine industry primarily because that expensive tower is not making money for the operator.

And there are other pics that you see like the one above of a wind turbine that caught on fire in Iowa. The post blamed the turbine for being dangerous and catching on fire itself. What really happened is that the wind turbine had been shut down, and there was a brush fire in the field below in which the flames got hot enough to catch the blade lowest to the ground on fire which spread up to the nacelle. They fortunately put out the brush fire before it spread far enough to catch any of the other turbines in the field on fire.
I’m going to show a couple more pictures, one from a turbine fire in England and one in Germany. These of course made headlines in their respective countries because a wind turbine fire is pretty dramatic, but in each case, and in the case above, these were one turbine in a field of more than 100. Interestingly enough I could not find a picture of a wind turbine on fire in Texas, even though Texas has more wind turbines than every other State in the US combined. There are more than 15,000 of them in Texas, and to my knowledge not a single one has caught on fire.


The other pictures and posts on LinkedIn are about how wind turbines are not really sustainable, have a higher carbon footprint than the energy they produce, and aren’t economically viable without all of the subsidies, so we should just forget about wind and solar since they don’t work, aren’t really sustainable, etc., etc.
While there are a number of us that are answering these posts with actual factual information, I thought maybe it was time I wrote a post about this to set the record straight. Maybe it will tamp down the noise and let us get on with improvements in the technologies that are necessary to get us out from under the control of Big Oil, and maybe it won’t, but at least it will be the truth as I know it.
First, wind turbines, if they are sited correctly and operated by responsible operators, are incredibly reliable machines and can actually provide a significant portion of base load power as long as they are distributed properly. The wind is always blowing somewhere because that is the nature of our very active atmosphere. The intermittency of wind energy is primarily because of poor siting and improper distribution of assets used to capture the energy of the moving air.
Wind turbines are also not as expensive as people used to think they were. Wind turbine blade technology has come a long way and now is mainstream with a large enough manufacturing capacity that the industry has achieved the economies of scale. The rest of the wind turbine is just the electrical generator and equipment in the nacelle, all of which is also benefitting from the economies of scale. In fact, it costs less in capital expense to put in a 10 megawatt capacity wind farm than it does a 10 megawatt gas turbine power plant. This includes the Government support for both the natural gas business (which is substantial) and renewables like wind energy. Why is it that Texas, one of the largest oil producing states, has something like 28% of the installed wind energy capacity in the US. It’s because it is cheaper to install wind turbines than to site and build a new natural gas power plant.

Now for the biggest argument that most people have when it comes to wind energy and sustainability. The blades are primarily glass fiber and resin, and as I have written many times, the resin is difficult to remove from the fibers when the end of life of the wind turbine blade arrives. So we end up with some very visible reminders of the technology that we need to adopt to deal with this problem.
Finally, to set the record straight for this particular issue, which is the one I have been writing about for about the last 6 months or so, there are a couple of technologies that have been demonstrated at industrial scale that are capable of recycling these used blades and returning useful glass fiber and a useful oily product that has the right chemistry to be useful in the remainder of the materials industry. I’m talking about not only remaking this stuff into new resin, but also the remainder of the plastics industry which is almost entirely based on the use of petroleum. The oily products that come from some of the recycling processes can be used directly as feedstocks to replace the petroleum feedstocks in the plastics industry.
There are of course still some things that need to be done, and some industry standards that need to be developed. And the recycling technologies need funding to get scaled up to where they can take on hundred to thousands of tons a day of recyclable wind turbine blades at each facility before this problem can be entirely solved.
In other words, all it is going to take, and I have said this before, is the political will and both Congress and the European Parliament to pass the laws and provide the funding to the companies that are ready to turn recycling of wind turbine blade fiberglass into a money making business. Once that gets fully underway, other companies will inevitably join in and develop their own processes and composite materials will finally be sustainable.
It is probably about time to get off my soap box at this point, so that’s about it for this week. I hope everyone that reads these posts enjoys them as much as I enjoy writing them. As usual I will post this first on my website – www.nedpatton.com – as well as on LinkedIn. And if anyone wants to provide comments to this, I welcome them with open arms. Comments, criticisms, etc. are all quite welcome. I really do want to engage in a conversation with all of you about composites because we can learn so much from each other as long as we share our own perspectives.
My second book is now in the hands of my publisher, with just one thing left for me to do, that hopefully will get done this week or early next week. Most of you know that it is about what I wrote in this newsletter and have been writing about for the last 6 months or so – sustainability of composites and a path to the future that does not include using fossil fuels for either the raw materials or the process energy to make composites. The title of the book, at least for now, is “Close the Circle, A Roadmap to Composite Materials Sustainability.” It truly is a roadmap which I hope that at least at some level the industry will follow. Only time will tell.
Finally, I still need to plug my first book, so here’s the plug. The book pretty much covers the watershed in composites, starting with a brief history of composites, then introducing the Periodic Table and why Carbon is such an important and interesting element. The book was published and made available last August and is available both on Amazon and from McFarland Books – my publisher. However, the best place to get one is to go to my website and buy one. I will send you a signed copy for the same price you would get charged on Amazon for an unsigned one, except that I have to charge for shipping. Anyway, here’s the link to get your signed copy: https://www.nedpatton.com/product-page/the-string-and-glue-of-our-world-signed-copy. And as usual, here’s a picture of the book.

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