Green? Energy
Sweetwater, Texas. Nice enough place – first town of any size out of Abilene headed to El Paso. Who would think they would be at the center of a green energy controversy?
One of the parts of the bill of goods sold us on green energy is how “clean” it is. Everything making energy from natural forces like wind and solar, and when it wears out, it’s all recyclable. Except – it isn’t. Should be – there are a recycling centers which recycle almost anything, but fiberglass is a specialty process.
While recycling fiberglass is technically possible, the process is not as straightforward or universally available as it is for materials like aluminum or certain thermoplastics. Its complex composition requires specialized industrial processes, making recycling less common than disposal in landfills. Biology Insights
From the same article, one of the ways to recycle fiberglass is to grind it up, almost to powder. This also reduces the glass strand length, weakening it. Or you can heat it high temperatures – has to be high to separate the glass. The resins which hold it together are thermoset resins, which, once set, can’t just be reheated for easy processing like thermoplastic resins such as those used in most molding. Then you have contaminants like paint, grease, metal fittings etc. which also need to be removed. Can fiberglass be recycled? Yes. Easily or cheaply? No, not yet.
Now imagine it in BIG chunks. Like, say the wind turbine blades you see driving down the highway. Wind turbines die all the time – they have a finite lifespan like most mechanical devices. Plus, they are ‘way high in the air, so replacing parts is tough. Much of the time, when they die, catch on fire, go bad – they just get left in place, two hundred plus feet of conundrum – what the heck are we supposed to do with THAT?
Attorney General Ken Paxton has filed a lawsuit against Global Fiberglass Solutions, Inc. and several affiliated entities, alleging the companies illegally dumped and abandoned thousands of wind turbine blades across two sites in Sweetwater.
Global Fiberglass Solutions, a company who promised to recycle the big fiberglass wind turbine blades, provide jobs, etc.
According to the lawsuit, Global was hired by various companies to break down and recycle the massive turbine components. Instead, investigators documented a stockpile of more than 3,000 blades and nacelles, the housings that enclose turbine engines, abandoned at the two facilities.
The state alleges that as of March 2025, the sites contained approximately 487,000 cubic yards of solid waste.
The lawsuit names Global Fiberglass Solutions of Texas, LLC, Global Fiberglass Solutions, Inc., GFSI-MHE Manufacturing of Texas, LLC, Vo Dynasty, LLC, and individual Donald Lilly as defendants.
That’s about 13 million cubic feet of scrap. Ever pass one of those turbine blades on a truck? 3,000+ of them?
The state’s claims include:
- Failure to Recycle: Under Texas law, facilities must recycle at least 75% of accumulated material annually to avoid being classified as a waste disposal site. The state alleges Global never met this threshold since operations began in 2017.
- Violation of Prior Orders: Global signed an “Agreed Order” in 2022 promising to cease accepting waste and to obtain proper permits. Investigators claim the company ignored the order, accepted new shipments, and eventually abandoned the sites.Fox4News
As you can see by the leading pic – that’s a whole lot of scrap. Tell me again how “green” this is?
Category: Exploitation, Global Warming, None
All Points Logistics just announced a new division, Green Energy Recycling. Their first transaction will be towing a broken down 1980’s vintage Jaguar abandoned on the River Road Off-ramp of I-495.
Don’t forget the first two letters of LLC stand for Limited Liability.
We’ve been talking about this in Texas for some time.
Mountains of old wind turbine blades, with nothing to do with them.
Somewhere there are reports of the amount of concrete poured to be the foundation for those turbines. Reclaiming that land will be cost-prohibitive as well.
But the Greenies don’t give a flip. They got their money from the scam and their feel-goods from their echo chambers.
Not to mention the tons of steel rebar used in those foundations as well!
Another reason for all these blades is companies got tax breaks and credits for replacing blades that were over ten years old even though the standard life span of a blade is 20 years.
So many of the blades in the photo were still functional and not in need of replacing.
I am shocked, shocked to find fuckery in the green energy world!
Not “green’, but much, much “greener”.
In the same amount of time one coal plant will produce 2.5M – 30M Cubic yards of toxic waste. This gets dumped into ponds and normally then leaches mercury, arsenic, selenium and other highly toxic heavy metals into the ground water. Makes the windmill blades seem quite tame by comparison.
Oil Powered plants produce around 100,000,000 tons of toxic waste annually. Around 75,000,000 tons of this is stored in ponds with the same issue as coal plants. This weighs more than every wind mill blade ever made combined. (for those who wonder there are about 75,000 windmills in the US, the heaviest blades of which weigh 35 tons. Even if every one of them weighed 35 tons [they don’t] that would only come to 7.6M tons, the average is closer to ten tons).
That is every single year, so it is impossible for windmills to ever catch up, even if we went to 100% wind power in the US, it would still be a fraction of the total created so far and it never detoxifies.
The issue here wasn’t the windmill blades themselves, it was the recycle company not fulfilling it’s contract to dispose of them. Fiberglass with epoxy is quite difficult to dispose of. Which is why fiberglass is being phased out and being replaced with Pecan 15, which is much easier to recycle and can be used to create other products much more easily.
You’re not a lawyer, but you’re clearly not an engineer either. We’ve had this discussion here before and it comes down to energy density. Wind and solar are NEVER going to put out enough power to justify all of this bullshit.
I’m not sure which “bullshit” you are referring to. All I am saying is that wind power produces a fraction of the waste byproduct from energy production that oil and coal do. The waste is less damaging to the water and air supply and takes up considerably less space.
That is just liquid and solid pollutants. You might be surprised to learn that since coal has shifted into obsolesce and oil power generation has been greatly reduced, air quality in the US has improved dramatically.
This is directly correlational to the change in what we use for fuel. Still plenty of room for improvement. We would probably be looking at no lead in the atmosphere at all if there was a change to some aviation fuels.
https://www.epa.gov/air-trends/air-quality-national-summary
HOW MANY thousands of acers of farmland and wildlife habitat have been destroyed so far for those boondoggles, I mean solar and wind farms? Let’s also nor forget the multitudes of birds KILLED by windmills.
Those “green” electrical vehicle batteries:
The big difference is that we’re upfront about the pollution from the fossil fuel processes. Every effort is made to mitigate it. With “green energy”, not so much. We’re not supposed to look behind the curtain. We’re supposed to accept the “no emissions” premise and ignore the caustic toxic waste and non-biodegradable mess left.
Not really. I just mentioned the amount produced from burning. The amount produced from collecting the fuel is much greater. The various byproducts created are not regulated. Oil and gas waste is often exempt from federal hazardous waste regulations (such as Subtitle C of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act). Depending upon the process, 3-10 barrels of waste are created for each barrel of oil pumped or recovered. Oftentimes the sludge is radioactive as it is full of radium. The effects of this are hidden and somewhat unpredictable.
https://www.epa.gov/radiation/tenorm-oil-and-gas-production-wastes
Nobody building the windmills ever said there was going to be NO pollution, but it is a fraction of the amount from conventional fuels so far as waste byproduct goes. It is also a lot safer than conventional fuels. The exception being natural gas. NG produces almost no solid and much less liquid byproduct from burning and the amount of produced water from pumping is also much lower. Also when burned it is much cleaner and produces less aerosol pollutants.
“Nobody building the windmills ever said there was going to be NO pollution, but it is a fraction of the amount from conventional fuels so far as waste byproduct goes.”
Nobody building the windmills or solar farms ever said a single word about what is required to produce wind and solar farms. A lie of omission. The left was so busy fapping away at the prospect of “emissions free” power production that they ignored the rest of the process.
It didn’t magic itself into existence. There were plans and permits and all kinds of things.
There absolutely was. All in the public domain, available to anyone. Now, how often did the Green New Deal zealots speak of the processes required to produce their magic green energy, and the resultant pollution? I’d wager that the answer lies somewhere between zero and never happened. The liberal environmentalists ate it up and green energy companies went ears deep in the federal grant trough. It was never about clean energy, it was about federal grant money laundered through sketchy corporations. Don’t get me wrong, wind and solar are great tools. It’s just not the green panacea we’re supposed to believe it is.
Much like the environmental impact of mining the precious metals for car batteries in Africa. Rape the environment while using child labor with no safety oversight, but hey, we’re doing it for the children. Not necessarily the children in Africa, but still…
I’m curious as to who, actually, weighs and/or measures each ton of “waste” or cubic yard of it from the coal and oil plants? What does the scale look like? Do they use the standard 25′ tape measure, or something else?
The amount of waste derived from burning different fuels is easily quantifiable. Rarely, someone will develop a process or something that makes things more efficient, but you can’t change the amount of waste byproduct produced. It is a simple process of looking at how much fuel burned to compute the waste created.
This a great scene about “Green Energy” from a really good show: Landman
Billy Bob Thornton, one the few sane people in Hollywood, plays Tommy Norris where he gives the 411 to this highly educated lawyer. Its worth a 5-minute watch.
My wife and I love that show. When Tommy gave his “alternative energy” speech, MRS D was crying laughing because it was exactly what I’ve been saying for years. Alternative energy is like any other tool, it can be great under certain circumstances. But it ain’t one size fits all and it damn sure ain’t green.
Same here. I’ve given that same speech for almost 20 years, but with a lot more profanity.
The reason they call it “green” is because of all the green taxpayer money it generates for the grifters.
I am also a fan of the show. I think the season 2 premiere was probably the best TV I’ve seen since Breaking Bad went off the air. I’ve seen this segment and FWIW, he is off on a few things that he fails to mention or gets wrong some others.
An oil well pad is 5-10 acres of concrete and the well can go down thousands of feet. A lot tougher to engineer too.
The only known wind farm powering a refinery, not oil wells, is owned by Valero. It is a smaller 50MW project.
The amount of diesel and shit they have to burn to haul out and place a wind turbine is less than that to emplace an oil well.
The amount of oil to lubricate turbines is 50-100 gallons. That is changed every 8-16 months. So in 20 years it might be 2000 gallons. Except that the the oil is fully recyclable, so really it only uses 100 gallons.
It will definitively offset the carbon footprint made to create it. It will still be running in 200 years.
99% of wind farms are connected to the grid. Electricity is one of the cheapest commodities to move. It is true that if Texas wind were suddenly to become the sole provider of electricity to the US it would take decades to build a grid connection that large. It would take a lot longer to build that many wind farms. So it is really a nonsense thing to say.
Wind power has been around a lot longer than oil as a source of power. It isn’t nearly a complex of a system either.
Exxon has constructed 40,000 wind turbines of the 75,000 in the US. They can’t be “all over the place” they have to be where the wind is. It is a massive amount, they are putting them up like crazy.
He is very much right about not having a good replacement for oil. Hard to say what will happen in 100 years, hoping we fix it by then, but we won’t be here to see it.
It’s not just the windmills that are going to be an issue. In the area around San Antonio as well as other Texas metro spots there are hundreds if not thousands of acres of solar panel farms. Those also have a finite lifespan.
The current “big thing” are battery farms, using E car batteries stacked together in medium sized boxes to store excess electricity in order to have it in time of need like the cold snaps that stress the grid. AFAIK there is only one place in the US that actually recycles those batteries.
SK Battery America, Redwood Materials, Ascend Elements , (previously known as Battery Resourcers), Cirba Solutions, and Li-Cycle all recycle Lithium batteries.
It is big business now $10B US in 2025, projected to grow to $30B US by 2030. Unlike recycling wind mill blades, the end product is very valuable and there is high incentive to actually do it.
Vermont has been going big for electric buses. There is one fleet of them that has been out of service for quite a while now. Seems they won’t charge below 41degrees. They are also not safe to be charged in a garage. They are a fire hazard. The only day in the forecast above freezing is next Saturday and that is predicted to be 34 degrees.
Teton county Wyoming tried electric shuttles for Jackson Hole Mountain Resort (formerly known as Teton Village). Epic fail.
The Biden administration was passing out pork for free busses 2021-2025. Some towns jumped on the bus without taking a hard look at what they were doing out of pure greed for free stuff. This is why market economics and not government programs need to be the source of municipal electric vehicles, if any.
South Pasadena went to all Teslas for their police force two years ago without issue. This actually makes sense. The mileage life cycle of a Tesla is triple that of the retired Crown Vic. They are also much faster and much faster off the line than any other police vehicle in common use in the US. Plus it hasn’t snowed there since 1949. They just have to arrest only Peruvians.
Hopefully some bright kid figures out how to make surf boards or canoes or snowboards or some other useful thing from scrap wind blades.
Parking lot curbs and speedbumps
Billboards
Park furniture
Tiny bad-weather-survival cabins for parks
School bus stop shelters for kids.
RV/Camper replacement roofs.
Bass boat hulls.
Navy gunnery targets
Drones for ADA gunnery practice
Boat hulls would be the most obvious item. No idea how to do that though.
Hey, where’s Lars? Found something that’ll he’ll hate…