Adding Perspective to the Wind Turbine Waste Debate
Electricity from coal produces 200 times as much solid waste as electricity from wind
There has been a lot of focus on wind turbines’ end of life recently. You may have seen posts and articles like the one above popping up in your social media feeds. Photos like these raise questions about whether you can really call wind turbines “green” if they create so much non-recyclable waste. Does burying tonnes of fiberglass at the end of a turbine’s life undo all the good work done by the clean energy generated over its lifetime?
These are completely reasonable questions, and I want to know the answers too.
But one thing that I noticed was that these questions are always about wind turbines in isolation. I didn’t see anyone asking how the waste produced by wind turbines compared to other forms of electricity generation, or other sources of waste. So I set out to do a little bit of what I am calling investigative engineering.
I was surprised by the results, and I think you will be too.
