THE MORNING RANT: Recycling Wind Turbine Blades, or Recirculating Money from Suckers?

There is a lot of money being thrown at those promising to recycle spent “green energy” hardware that isn’t actually recyclable. The problem is that once the money is gone, the unrecycled waste continues to pile up.

The wind energy scam has been going on long enough now that decommissioned wind turbine blades are piling up by the thousands. Because recycling has become a near-religious virtue, and because the amount of waste is so staggering, there is a desperation to do something with the mountain of blades other than bury them.

Sweetwater, Texas has become a graveyard for thousands of these blades, filling many acres. Texas Monthly has been following the recycling scam perpetrated by a company which claimed it had a revolutionary technology to recycle the blades.

Thousands of Old Wind Turbine Blades Pile Up in West Texas [Texas Monthly – 8/24/2023]

The blades were brought here by Global Fiberglass Solutions, a company based in Washington State that announced in 2017 its intention to recycle blades from wind farms across the region. Instead of ending up in landfills, they would be ground up into a reusable material that could be turned into pallets, railroad ties, or flooring panels. Global Fiberglass is one of a few companies attempting to develop a viable business from recycling blades.

Global Fiberglass Solutions actually hit on a clever business model for this era – getting paid by those who want to claim they are engaged in the green act of “recycling.” Of course, there was the ethical problem that Global Fiberglass didn’t actually recycle the blades. But they got paid handsomely to haul the blades away with the promise of recycling them. Those paying Global Fiberglass could virtuously claim to have “recycled” their spent turbine blades. Unfortunately for residents of Sweetwater, the blades were simply dumped and abandoned in their town.

Some paid Global Fiberglass to remove the older blades and haul them away. The company set up shop in an empty industrial facility in Sweetwater that was once an aluminum recycling plant, but Don Lilly, the managing director of Global Fiberglass, told me that only a handful of blades have ever been ground up there. He said the company was close to ramping up and would soon mill the blades into pieces the size of coarse sand. “The blade material is sold,” he said, “but I can’t go into that part yet.”

“Close to ramping up…” How many suckers have heard that line as they “invest” in a revolutionary new technology?

Sweetwater has heard such pledges before. The county declared the stockpile a public nuisance a year ago.

It wasn’t just Sweetwater finding itself suckered into providing a dump for Global Fiberglass. The city of Newton, Iowa had a similar problem, ultimately determining that the “recycling operation” it had recruited to town was actually just an unpermitted dump.

Frank Liebl, executive director of the Newton Development Corporation, testified at a state hearing that the initial excitement in 2017 of recruiting a blade-recycling company soon soured. In the intervening years, he asked Global Fiberglass many times when it would begin its recycling. He always got “the same answer: ‘Soon,’ ” he said.

It is hardly surprising that a major corporation like GE got swindled by Global Fiberglass. GE needed to brag about recycling their wind turbines, so they paid Global Fiberglass to haul them away for that purpose. They obviously weren’t recycled.

Update, 9/25/2023: General Electric filed a lawsuit last week claiming that Global Fiberglass Solutions has failed to fulfill its promise to recycle thousands of blades. GE says it paid the company $16.9 million to recycle about five thousand wind turbine blades, but that GFS instead stockpiled them at facilities in Sweetwater and Iowa. “Only after GFS took millions of dollars from GE, did GFS all but shut down its operations without recycling the Blades,” reads the complaint, filed in U.S. district court in New York.

The Global Fiberglass scam predictably began with a promoter and his start-up company promising revolutionary green new technology. The founder has a degree in sociology, not anything scientific. Go figure. From a hagiographic newspaper story in Washington from 2015:

“Bothell Business Owner Creates New Industry for Recycling Fiberglass”

By all accounts Don Lilly, owner and mastermind behind Global Fiberglass Solutions, doesn’t fit the traditional mold of the industrial business owner. Despite owning a quickly-growing fiberglass recycling business, Lilly says he studied sociology while attending the University of Nebraska. It’s only been within the last half-decade the 50-year-old Bothell resident has taught himself chemistry and engineering. “I didn’t start out looking to be a decommissioning expert in wind turbine blades,” he said with a laugh…

In a follow-up piece at Texas Monthly from just a few days ago, it is reported that Newton, Iowa has successfully found a different start-up company to “recycle” its massive pile of wind turbine blades.

Iowa Is Cleaning Up Its Massive Pile of Wind Turbine Blades. Why Can’t Texas? [Texas Monthly 5/08/2024]

This finding has paved the way for a Tennessee company called Carbon Rivers to begin the lengthy process of recycling about one thousand blades into material to make, among other items, composite decking boards, ceiling tiles, and injection-molded automobile cupholders.

“We can entirely and completely reuse a wind turbine blade,” said David Morgan, the chief strategy officer of Carbon Rivers. “You have glass fiber and carbon fiber composite and resin and other constituent parts like wood and foam. All that can be recovered.” When I asked him what he saw when he looked at photographs of the blades in Sweetwater, he said, “I see a new boat, a new car, a new blade. There is no longer any need whatsoever to landfill composites.”

Sure.

While I would certainly like to see Carbon Rivers make the growing mountain of blades go away, I am highly skeptical. They have an almost endless supply of raw materials that they will be paid to take, yet they are receiving taxpayer grants rather than being self-sufficient with revenue from the sale of recycled products.

“Carbon Rivers Makes Wind Turbine Blade Recycling and Upcycling a Reality With Support From DOE” [Energy.gov – 10/17/2022]

Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Wind Energy Technologies Office, the Carbon Rivers project team, led by…in collaboration with the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, successfully scaled up a recovery process that has the capability to divert thousands of tons of waste that would otherwise be destined for landfills. To date, Carbon Rivers has upcycled a few thousand metric tons and is building capacity in their new facility to take in over 50,000 metric tons annually.

”…has the capability.” What this means is that the recycling of wind turbines blades is not actually happening, or at least it wasn’t in October 2022 when this was published. “A few thousand metric tons” of blades can be numbered in the dozens.

From just a few days ago, Carbon Rivers is still taking taxpayer money “to improve recycling of wind turbine blades…”

“Tennessee Making Waves with New Clean Energy Initiatives” [The Business Download – 4/05/2024]

The federal government has made millions of dollars available to the Volunteer State for new clean power projects that improve energy efficiency and grid resilience. The funding includes $1.1 million to Knoxville’s Carbon Rivers to improve recycling of wind turbine blades…

If Carbon Rivers is someday successful and profitable in recycling the wind turbine blades in Newton, Iowa, I will applaud and celebrate them. But I doubt that will be happening.

Here is one final quote from that most recent Texas Monthly piece, which captures the virtuosity in the fraud-to-date of recycling wind turbine blades:

Global Fiberglass has an office around the corner, connected to an open-sided industrial warehouse. “Recycling in Progress,” reads a sign on a box truck parked behind a chain-link fence, but the evidence suggests that’s an empty promise. The front steps to the office teem with weeds and wildflowers, including an intensely yellow patch of brown-eyed Susans that have grown from a crack in the pavement. I knocked on the locked door for a couple of minutes and yelled a greeting through the fence. As I waited for a response that never came, I peered at the remains of a gutted camper at what the company had promised would be a facility humming with activity.

“Recycling in Progress.” The money of suckers has been recirculated, but that is the only recycling that is in progress.

My latest piece at The Pipeline, How Government Subsidies Put Money in Tesla’s Coffers, has been published.

In recent years, about 10 percent of Tesla’s gross income has come from the sale of carbon credits, which are awarded by various governmental agencies. Tesla then sells these credits to other auto manufacturers whose product is gasoline powered vehicles.

Whether you love Elon Musk or hate him, can we agree that Tesla should not be getting a cut of the action when someone buys a Honda or a Chevrolet?

I’d be honored if you’d give it a read.

buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com

posted by Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM

| Access Comments