How Green Of Them: Wind Energy Companies Dump Turbines In Landfills

September 6, 2019

The left won’t stop talking about how wind turbines are great for the environment. Yet as is often the case with the eco-left, reality doesn’t match their rhetoric.

Iowa is well known for its wind farms – but where do used wind turbines go when they’re not needed anymore? As it turns out, they get dumped into landfills, polluting our environment.

The Argus Leader reports that Iowa wind energy companies are bringing old wind turbines to Sioux Falls, South Dakota and dumping them in landfills at large rates.

As the Argus Leader explains, turbines need to “be replaced after a decade or two,” and that means wind energy producers are “looking for places to accept the [old] blades. In fact, this year alone, over 100 turbine blades have been sent to the city dump in Sioux Falls, and they’re massive – each one is 120 feet long.

The eco-left thinks that windmills are environmentally friendly, but clearly they have significant environmental consequences. They also require petrochemicals to make, raising questions as to how eco-extremists think windmills will be produced if they ban oil and coal, as many of them claim to want.

The Institute of Electric and Electronics Engineers explains how windmills require conventional energy.

“Large trucks bring steel and other raw materials to the site, earth-moving equipment beats a path to otherwise inaccessible high ground, large cranes erect the structures, and all these machines burn diesel fuel. So do the freight trains and cargo ships that convey the materials needed for the production of cement, steel, and plastics. For a 5-megawatt turbine, the steel alone averages 150 metric tons for the reinforced concrete foundations, 250 metric tons for the rotor hubs and nacelles (which house the gearbox and generator), and 500 metric tons for the towers.”

That steel requires coke from coal as well as natural gas. “To make the steel required for wind turbines that might operate by 2030, you’d need fossil fuels equivalent to more than 600 million metric tons of coal,” the IEEE finds.

As is often the case, the environmentalists’ ideology doesn’t match the more complicated scientific and economic reality. Whenever the eco-left tells you that wind mills have no environmental harms, or that they can replace fossil fuels, listen to the science, not their false rhetoric.