So what's the resale value of a wind turbine? You know, sold for parts.

My knowledge of wind energy is, uh...limited, but not entirely absent. Feel free to fill the gaps.

Let's say a wind turbine lasts 20 years. When it stops working or, more likely, when its upkeep costs more than the energy it generates, what happens to it? Do we break it down, burn it, just leave it there? My understanding is that the sturdier ones, the ones that don't degrade very readily (if at all) just get buried and hopefully forgotten forever. (That'll be one hell of an archaeological dig site in a thousand years! Big, too.) Maybe they chip them into pieces before burying them? I don't know.

What if someone bought them and made them into housing? Towers of a castle-like build? Maybe split them down the middle and half-buried them, for insulation? Sustainable housing, if only sustainable because it doesn't break down for a good long time (and therefore doesn't need to be replaced for just as long).

Why isn't someone already doing this? Are they made of something horribly toxic and detrimental to human health? Maybe someone's already doing it and I just can't find it? What am I missing, here?

Sarah Franc wrote:

Why isn't someone already doing this? Are they made of something horribly toxic and detrimental to human health? Maybe someone's already doing it and I just can't find it? What am I missing, here?

It isn't very glamorous, so doesn't get talked about much. It is being done already, and there is a decent effort being put in to find uses for the few parts - such as the blades themselves - which are harder to recycle. All of the mechanical components - gearing, the electrics etc... already get 100% recycled.

It's a popular complaint on social media that turbines are ugly/wasteful/expensive to build/impossible to recycle... and is commonly repeated ad-nauseum by global warming deniers and those with a vested interest in the oil industry. You won't hear those same people leveling similar complaints at infrastructure being built by the petrochemical industry, which does a pretty good job of showing their hypocrisy.

A few seconds on google popped up:

https://cen.acs.org/environment/recycling/companies-recycle-wind-turbine-blades/100/i27

- using the shredded fibreglass as a filler in concrete, which saves on fuel (burning the resin) and produces more environmentally friendly concrete.

https://www.energy.gov/eere/wind/articles/carbon-rivers-makes-wind-turbine-blade-recycling-and-upcycling-reality-support
- using a controlled combustion process to recycling the glass fibres (heat produced by burning the resin generates electricity)

The issue right now, is that capacity for recycling blades does not yet match the rate at which they are being produced. This isn't at all surprising really, as the installation rate of turbines has seen explosive growth and the facilities for processing the waste products lag behind. No one is going to build a processing plant NOW for a waste stream that will be available in 20 years.

As for using these turbines to build houses etc... I think we will likely see small niche projects, but these are unlikely to become widespread. There are big issues with location/distribution. These turbine blade are absolutely massive. They are expensive to transport, and as a waste product they want to minimise the expense (and carbon cost!) or hauling them.  Unless you have a source of turbine blades on your doorstep, transporting them to your new house is likely to be prohibitively expensive. On the other hand, shredding them to pack nicely into a standard lorry is very easy to do at or near the source, so they can be hauled to a processor for recycling. I think this is likely to be the model that we see dominating in another 20 years.

Here in Europe, where we have limited land area, landfilling is already prohibitively expensive. The cost of burying huge blades is already very high, and so wind farms are highly motivated to find other, cheaper alternatives such as reprocessing. Even shredding blades before burial - compressing the volume down to a tiny fraction of what it was - would be cheaper than burying intact blades.