Biodegradable wind turbine blades. This could revolutionise the green industry!!
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- Опубліковано 29 вер 2024
- Wind power is becoming an ever more dominant force in global electricity grids. But it's 'dirty secret' is that the turbine blades are currently almost impossible to recycle. Now a team at the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) claims to have used plant-based biomass to create blades that can be completely broke down at the end of their operational lifetime and refabricated into new products. So, how do they do that then?
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No one is producing a blade "230 meters in length". The longest is currently China's LZ blade, which is 123 meters. Still ridiculously long, but it will be a while before anyone gets over 200 meters.
He likely meant 230 meter rotor diameter. A 230-meter blade is huge, and I suspect we will never get there from a practicality perspective, but you never know.
@@edl653 Obviously...rocketmanz not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
Wind turbine blades do not leech and are a miniscule part of landfill... This is a good innovation but hardly a "revolution" (although blades do spin if you can forgive the pun).
I was having trouble swallowing the argument that old turbine blades are a problem. For one, these long blades can produce some long building products just like we do with trees.
I've never understood the pearl clutching about turbine blades not being recyclable. Every single element that went into their production came from out of the ground. Why is it so bad to put them back into the ground? Also, why has there been no similar concern about the many other products that are made from carbon fibre? Seems disingenuous.
Absolutely correct. The often repeated photo of blades in a landfill is zoomed in on a tiny tiny part of a landfill. It gives the impression that it's the whole landfill, but actually wouldn't even be a tenth of one percent of the whole landfill site.
what I find fascinating is that anti-renewable crowd make a big deal of some problems, that even if real, are still minuscule compared to fossil fuels, to the point of it becoming a PR hit to companies investing in those technologies. and end up pushing them to develop solutions to those problems, making renewables even better than they were before.
@@danilooliveira6580 yep. A billion tonnes of coal ash that does actually leach vast quantities of toxic material is apparently fine, while a million tonnes of inert plastics that have been disposed of responsibly is beyond the pale.
See also "Aberfan" and hundreds of similar disasters.
I was thinking this would have "Hemp" in it's mix as that plant can be used for this as well, but anything that moves to stop humanities rush to end this planet's ability to support life as we know it is welcome.
So was I 😊
Have you seen Henry Ford taking a sledge hammer to his hemp bodied car and watching the hammer bounce off?
@@morninboy Yes, I remember that. I think they should revisit Hemp as I think that will solve many of their problems. ua-cam.com/video/srgE6Tzi3Lg/v-deo.html
hemp is not magic, it's just really good fibers. but carbon fibers are not the problem here, it's the polymers used to bind everything together. if they used hemp they would still need to use the same polymers to give it rigidity.
Has anyone looked at using Bamboo or Hemp in their testing? Fast growing, great fibres.
The rotor diameter is 260m, not the blade length. The blades would be about 120m, most of the radius. SANY has been making 130m blades in China.
Hi Dave, Another awesome video with great information! Thumbs up! Jim
Pretty soon we're going to start seeing shipyards repurposed as wind turbine factories.
Already happening in Denmark
sounds brilliant !! 🤞🤞🤞
I know that there is used a lot of dangerous chemicals when the blades are produced. But Dave is talking of “dangerous chemicals leaking from the blades in landfills”? It’s often said by critics of wind turbines, but is there any evidence of it? It’s reason they are hard to recycle. They are very durable.
I wonder what the initial LCOE wouild be for this material use, if it's something that requires too much government subsidy it's difficult to believe it would be widely adopted. Specially given that governments dont seem to be in a rush to stop subsidizing fossil fuels
Good news! Great video, Dave, cheers!
On the subject of the blades currently headed to landfill: They could easily serve a second life as a bus shelter, house roof or noise abaitment barrier at the side of a busy carriageway; it shows we have a problem with lack of creative thought rather than an item that is truely at the end of its useful life.
the problem with creative solutions is that they are very niche and don't really solve the problem. they could offer to sell the blades for people wanting to buy them for a specific projects. but overall it wouldn't solve the problem.
Any chance of a lightweight reusable metal core with a replaceable skin? AI design metal printed core. Metal leading edges. Lightweight synthetic skin
Maybe a chance, but.... what's great about wrapped composites is their section modulus. All of the mass is on the outside of the structure, making it as stiff and rigid as possible.
If you had an inner structure that had to support itself and provide the framework to support the skin, I don't think it would be as strong and would have to be heavier. I think the idea is possible, but not optimal from a strength to weight standpoint.
If it is downcycling (and it is), then we should already think about, how to reuse or recycle the products form this "elastic liquid".
PCAN sounds is better the epoxy raisin+ glass fiber, but as for the recycebility of it... Lots of things right now can be downcycled or even recycled, but we don't do that, cause it is hard to get a clean substrate for recycling. I find it hard to believe that those blades will be as fit for the methanol bath in real life, as in lab. It is hope, but needs real live testing.
The world produces 42 million tons of waste toilet paper per year. That's just toilet paper. We waste 1.3 billion tons of food per year. So with 43Mt by 2050 we're not talking big numbers here on a global scale.
Are these wiper blades instead of toilet paper?
Toilet paper degrades relatively quickly therefore doesn’t need to be put into landfill. Food waste isn’t great but that’s not a landfill issue either.
Wind even with landfill is better than fossil fuels but why not look to improve the process if the incentives are there
@@widescreen8964
Absolutely. See my comment.
I've tried but it's hard to reuse toilet paper
@@StokeseyHD But what about the packaging of that toilet paper, and that food? Have you seen your garbage, how full of plastic it is? Now multiply that by the world's population, and there is the real landfill problem. And what about clothing? Made mostly of plastic or long-lasting fibers like wool, and we throw away 92 million tonnes of old clothes every year.
How about replaceable edges where the wear is?
Good question. Why do blades wear out. Could they not be made more durable.
@@petewright4640 they are going at almost the speed of sound at the wing tip so hitting any air particles (salt, water, birds...) will cause damage.
I agree with OP, I would be curious for why replaceable edges don't work.
(Because I am sure if it was easy to do they would have already been a thing)
@@petewright4640 Because UV rays are terrible. They burn absolutely everything. Any polymer will eventually be destroyed by the sun. And there is no, non polymer alternative.
Helicopter rotors are made from aluminum as far as I know and sometimes use blade tape to protect the very ends of the rotors. I was in a helicopter when a piece of blade tape came off one of the 5 rotor blades. We had to land and remove the other pieces to get back the balance. Maybe something similar could work?
I think the wear is more extensive than just the edges. BTW, turbines operating normally don't go anywhere near the speed of sound. The tips go 1-2 hundred miles per hour. A turbine tip would only reach the speed of sound if the brakes failed in a hurricane, and it would quickly explode.
I wonder, can you not make car body panels from old blades? If they are chopped up and shredded carbon fiber and fibreglass, can they not then be remoulded?
@@bibliotek42 hempcrete
Unfortunately, that’s not how it works. Once carbon is set in resin, that’s it.
Problem.is that currently tey use thermosetting rather than the thermosoftening polymers than can be remoulded.
No! this is not a "low hanging fruit"
Sounds good as far as it goes.
I'll wait and see where this stuff ends up after it's second life and what you can do with it from there.
Three steps down, shopping bags
By all means, this is nice, but not so much for blades.
Wind turbine blades disposal is an almost trivial problem, except for those having to dispose of them.
Blades are and will be an absolutely tiny share of landfills, and they are inert. They don't leak poisons, don't emit any emissions. For the world at large they cause no trouble.
It always makes me laugh how anti wind turbine people always criticize the fact that you can't recycle blades yet they have no problem with having a power plant emit millions of tonnes of CO2 and other more directly harmful gas compounds to produce the same electricity some wind turbines would have produced
@@texanplayer7651That's because they are unknowingly repeating oil industry propaganda.
Yeah! They don't turn into methane, they don't leach heavy metals or other toxic material into the water table and no one has to try to communicate a message ten thousand years into the future to the effect of 'hey, don't dig this shit up.'
That being said, being able to reuse stuff is generally a good thing.
Or....failing that, we could just plug into the monolithic heat energy of the planet - and have constant high grade clean energy forever after!
corrosion and heat at drill depth
@@morninboy Nasa/Sandia considered materials survivability in their 1982 Magma Energy Project study, which concluded 'there are no insurmountable barriers that would invalidate the magma energy concept.' That was 40 years ago; drilling technology and materials science has come on leaps and bounds since then. I cannot believe there's a monolithic amount of energy just out of reach, just beyond the wit of man! I'd sooner believe the moon landings were faked!
Blade disposal at least puts the blades in a landfill where it's as sequestered as we can get it.
Chips and so on off the blades that end up on the ground or water around the turbine as the blades wear end are more worrying. The great fiberglass garbage patch will be the next thing to clean up in the ocean
Totally. We already produce unbelievable amounts of garbage from packaging. Complaining about the turbines is like complaining that a bathroom tile is cracked when the house is on fire. Ridiculous.
Nah. Fiberglass is denser than water, so it'll just sink. Problem solved :-p.
Turbine blade chips are inconsequential compared to other sources of plastic waste, like clothing or consumer produce packaging or fishing nets. Ridiculously inconsequential. Making an issue of them is doing the work of big fossil.
I am curious as to why we need to dispose of these in the first place. Is there structural damage introduced over time that cannot be repaired? Improvements in blade design / efficiency that has an ROI greater than the losses than leaving as-is?
They're constantly being exposed to the sun, and changing between stopped and moving very very fast.
That's both fatigue damage and UV damage, not to mention they get rained on.
Plus, there's bits of grit in the wind.
The blades erode away and bits crack off, making the surface less useful as a wing, hastening the wear, and putting out less power.
We likely won't come up with a new material that's light enough to get up to the crazy tip speeds and doesn't slowly degrade in the elements. At least, not better than fiberglass
Yes. Generally flexing in the blade breaks the fibers, eventually it eats into the margin of safey and the blade gets shitcanned. Generally eveything is designed to wear out at more or less the same time.
Amazing
Turbine blades are a pretty small fraction of the market for fiber-reinforced polymer composites. Auto, truck, and aircraft bodies, furnishings, architectural components . . . the potential is huge for a truly re-usuable polymer.
I also wonder what, exactly, is the failure mode for blades that reach the end of their lives while still in use. If the carbon fibers are still fine, would it be possible to anneal the blades, relieving any internal stresses and healing any cracks and delaminations? (You'd need some degree of thermoplasticity in the cured polymer, but that can be designed in.)
UA-cam suggested I watch a video on commercial Balsa wood growing.
It’s a big part of turbine blade construction.
Worth a watch.
Making something that must withstand harsh weather 24/7 and UV during the day out of anything biodegradable sounds like asking for trouble. Biodegradable stuff usually sucks at harsh environment durability.
The Dogger Bank wind farms A to C are using GE Halide turbines. Unfortunately they have had manufacturing issues which is holding up the build out by nearly 12 months now!
While all these numbers of potential waste from turbine blades sound bad, realize that the CUMULATIVE projected waste from ALL turbines decommissioned between now and 2050 is less than 5 percent of the coal ash the world produces EACH YEAR. So yes, this will be good for PR, and maybe it will even save a little money, but recycling turbine blades is of miniscule importance compared to reducing carbon emissions and reliance on fossil fuels overall.
Wonderful, a larger footprint per tower.
Meanwhile, a vertical wind turbine design based on large spinnaker sails would catch more wind and be set atop one another.
Each level of the tower should hold 3 to 6 spinnakers to increase rotation. Also, the spinnakers could be made from biodegradable or recyclable materials, such as cloth like the sails on the Cutty Sark or a Clipper ship.
To save weight, the sails could be made in panels or with a grid of small "windows" properly reinforced in the spinnakers.
This design in a compact version that could be mounted atop tall buildings, along the dyed to resemble a merry go round, in urban wind tunnels between buildings, and other windy places.
The vertical layout gives options on where to place the generator, top -middle or -bottom. This will also allow extra sound proofing around the structure. The generator could be put underground.
To minimize tower flex, a set of 4 could be loosely connected at the top by retaining bars.
Just have a Think. If you throw away the box, so much more is possible.
How do the fiberglass blades leech toxic chemicals into landfills? Aren’t they inert? And how much mass/volume do blades make up in landfills compared to municipal solid waste?
also, Modvion in Sweden makes full size wooden towers. After the wind turbine's life of 30 years, the tower sections can be re-used as small housing, construction etc. And 100 years after that, as heating fuel. That's a long time carbon sink, while more trees are grown.
230 meters could wrap around my house 5 times almost. That'd make amazing siding.
Good for bench seats, and rain covers. Good for shingles.
All that would just require cutting the panels into 10cm strips, or squares, and moving them to the job site. Not complicated, or all that expensive. Least compared to burying them forever.
Could probably make car panels out of them, but that'd probably require some more shaping.
I'm convinced in a hundred years we'll be digging up all the garbage piles to get all the useful stuff buried in them. From organics to metals to polymers, it's got everything. Just need some better sorting tech (or an abundance of labor, insert 'AI is coming for our jerbs" meme here).
Yummy! The insects and animals will enjoy eating these plant based products.
I love the idea of Piezoelectric playgrounds for kids with battery packs to generate adjunct electricity to be pulled from to fill short gaps in production
Ahhh thanks Dave that sounds really exciting ................. thanks for all you do
8:45 - If that's the actual polymer structure, then it is most certainly biodegradable and may be recyclable for lower tier functions. The key question though is what additives are included in the formulation. Putting aside biodegradability, PVC is a great polymer. But it is doped with >50% w/w plasticizer which has historically been DEHP or other phthalate replacements which are quite toxic. Every time you go into a hospital and get an IV bag stuck in your veins, bear in mind that you are getting (at least for saline) a relatively small dose of plastizer and other additives with each bag (be it PVC or LDPE, most commonly).
"Made from recycled rotor blades." Sells itself, wouldn't you think? And pretty hefty material at that, so products made from this stuff would be more expensive but seriously outlast items molded from PLA, etc. I like it.
You did a video on Recycling Techologies a while back, remember? Their process takes any plastic and pyrolyses and distills it into an organic chemistry feedstock called Plax. From there you can make any plastics or organic compounds you choose. You presented the process then as the answer to plastic recycling and I believe you were right.
But now you presentent it as an energy hungry toxic process that needs to be avoided. Obviously, the company behind todays video describes pyrolysis based methods as untenable. They need to get support for cooking the plastic in high pressure hot flammable solvent for hours. Which process is better is not a given, it would depend on economics, the desired end product and technical properties of the processes.
Also, the "turbine blade conundrum" certainly is not big compared to the gigatons of plastic we spew into the biosphere. If an average persons whole electricity comsumtion came from wind, then that persons contribution to resin- fibre waste would be 15 kg over the life span of that turbine, or like 10 grams per year.
Now make a video about why this is considered a huge environmental problem.
What about covering and filling with concrete to be breakwaters/reef nurseries
I noticed that Siemens Gamesa are developing a fully recyclable blade. As with all aspects of renewable energy, things keep getting better and better over time. That is what I love about this industry. I also hope that the current blades in landfills will be recycled in the future, in an energy to waste type set up maybe ?????
I like the idea of using easily recycled/broken down materials as much as possible. I'm guessing that the currently used wind turbine designs with the huge blades has been determined to be the BEST, most EFFICIENT design? What about vertical turbines, or spiral turbines? It would seem to me, who isn't an expert, those designs might prove more effective, and could use less materials to begin with, thus requiring less mass to be recycled. Still use the improved material options....
As I said, I am NOT an expert. Just curious and questioning.
I have often wondered about Henry Ford's hemp bodied car and if that old technology would be applicable.
I would think someone has looked into it.
PECAN16 sounds wonderful, but the road from research/lab through to production is the real story. But with the 'old tech' blades. using as fill in durable structures especially if it can add reinforcing to replace some cement (flyash can be used instead of cement and is a good way to dispose of dry flyash) in concrete structures. BTW, Looking at using flyash in this way use might be a good video suggestion.
Really clever how the previous turbine manufacturers offloaded the end-of-life cost for these devices on somebody else.
Necessity is the mother of invention. Great to see this development, hopefully this becomes industry standard, soon.
5:05 I like how he say 43 million tonnes of discarded wind blades as if that is a big number!
We are releasing 37 000 million tonnes of CO2 each year!!! While it is a lot of waste you have to put things in scale.
Yes it is good if we could avoid that, but we should also not let perfect get in the way of something good.
Just a wild prediction, but (assuming we don't exterminate ourselves first.) I think many of today's turbines, possibly even solar will never be replaced. I really believe that in ten to 15 years, geothermal is going to be where all the money is going. If the two main industry leaders aren't full of it, we could see a true paradigm shift as soon as they get a few working demos built. (We are still going to need fusion to try to repair some of the damage we've done, but it's nowhere as near to maturity, as the new geothermal tech.)
I calculated that global co2 from burning oil is like 43 million tons per day. Spent blades don't look like a massive problem in comparison.
I'm no expert but there must be an impact from the materials used to make blades (oil ?)
Finally…took long enough……we need to be developing new tech with recycling as a matter of course.
Sounds like a 'wind-wind' to me. And no shortage of tidal energy in Orkney waters for recycling, and perhaps even hydrogen production for shipping them up and down
Diameter of a turbine blade at the root is 10-16 feet, according to chatgpt. How about cutting that bit off and using it for a tiny house? You could use other parts for roofing...look like a bunch of mushrooms!
Worth a go. I'm a bigger fan of solar panels all over every building and parking lot. From what I understand, the materials for those are very recyclable.
The wind turbine blades make up less than 10% of the total composites that are disposed of in landfills. There is a much larger amount of composites like boat hulls, shower stalls, surfboards, industrial waste, etc.
How much do these blades cost, to manufacture and maintain, vs the old landfill ones? Probably what it will come down to.
Over 70% of new wind turbines have balsa wood as their cores already.
I feel like mentioning that while putting old turbine blades in landfills isn't ideal, they make up a small fraction of a percent of 'regular' landfill waste. Also some of it has a new life as a pedestrian bridge or ingredient for pavement production. Anyway, biodegradable is definitely better.
this is a good example of how good things can be accomplished if you just start from a different position instead of working with the status quo. Maybe we can take another, even better starting position and work from there, whatever that may be.
Is it time to bring in the imaginative architects to incorporate end-of-life wind turbine blades in their designs, for example pairs of blades bolted root-to-root to a triangular section steel ridge beam so as to produce a strong and light roof structure with most weight carried by the central spine, and curtain walling at the tips. Or something like that ...
Finally wind turbine blades that will disintegrate!
But who will they denigrate? That's the real problem.
@@custos3249 birds
4:58 Listening to this section, I had I thought outside the box on a different side.
We are so good at making things that are not biodegradable, we should get even better at it and start sequestering more fossil carbon in landfills with our disposable economy.
JHT on that!😊
China building high speed trains and doublebladed biodegradble wind turbines. The us hasnt bulit a descent train and exports hella lng
I'm no engineer, but, unless some of the comments are wrong, it sounds like a win, win, win. At least, I hope it is.
If by switch they can save that 2nd heating and curing cycle, that by itself is a win by reducing energy requirements and time which translates into cost savings. CO2 emissions and recycling benefits are the gravy to the new material technology.
Well now lets find a way to not poison the water with coatings to prevent muscles and other sealife to stick to the platforms below the water surface.
Could the turbine blade be injected with foam and then used to make giant rafts with solar panels on top?
Marvelous stuff. Reminds me of the alchemy of ox blood and manure in cement
Correct me if I'm wrong but hasn't Vestas solved this one with a chemical process that returns the components of a blade to a state where they can be reused to make new blades! They claim that it's so effective that it will be worth digging up old blades to recycle them for materials.
Like EV batteries still having a life long after the car is done, it seems to me that we haven't been clever enough to find a reuse for this amazing material. There will be structural limitations due to their age, but their strength and light weight seem like they'd be ideal to be sliced into ribs for lightweight modular or assembled portable structures. Think disaster relief, temporary work camps etc.
Thanks again for some hopeful news, Dave! 🎉😊
When you mention "plant based" I thought it would be about genetically modified trees that grew in the right size and shape to be used as turbine blades straight out of the ground.
If a tall tree was used as the tower the blades could grafted in place before it grew to full-size. Indeed they could be harvested at different stages in their growth depending on the size of turbine you required. You could produce anything from a small bush turbine for domestic use to one the size of the mighty redwood.
They should Reporpois to produce compressed air,as a electrical sistem doesn't past the normative but caes are stand alone sistem
Dave, only part of the comments are visible. What to do about this?
Let's hope they pop up in one of your follow up videos when they are testing full scale prototypes. It seems likely that other GRP products might also get the green treatment courtesy of this product.
Why can't the blades be cut into managed sized pieces and used as a housing material to those without traditional homes? Rather than tents in war torn places, the panels could be used to form walls and/or roofs to shield people against the elements! Putting them in landfills seems stupid.
I love some of the architectural features old blades have been used for, a bus/coach shelter, overengineered, and beautiful.
We just need to find something to do with the goo. Probably turn out as popular as old blades
I have often wondered why the blades were not made of bamboo laminate instead of carbon fiber. Bamboo is a lighter weight density as well as stronger than carbon fiber not to mention easily sourced.
If the blades are so resilient why can’t they be reused? The older ones will undoubtedly not be up to snuff but later ones?
I don’t get it why aren’t the generator in the base of the tower ? It is with a hydro system . I would have thought much safer ?
I wonder if the old blades can be used as segmented body armor?
Also the half tip could be used as re rigid sail for modern sail ships.
This seems to be good development, engineers ans scientists never give up...
Now we can shut up another one of the ante renewable talking points.
stupid idea ? roofing tiles made of turbine blades
The dirty secret is 8,000,000,000 humans
Thanks for the new video!
I lasted 7min of this video. I hope the next one is more interesting for me 🙂
Rather than using shredded turbine blades under roads, lets use them under footpath and cycle ways. We need more of those to help support active travel and the alternatives to driving around for short local trips, with all its negatives, and so anything that could reduce the costs of the foot & cycle ways should be welcome.
Why not shred all non recyclable plastics and makes roads etc out of them. It not a solution.
And what about the horses? Particularly the horses exhausted from chasing foxes?
I don't know what the answer is. I don't even know what the question is.
However I think that the failure to consider turbine blades within the overall context of the horses represents a severe decline in integrated civilization awareness.
Or pile''em on the foreshore as breakwaters?
Why do blades wear out. Could they not be made more durable.
Dave, did I see you in Palermo on Wednesday?
Very interesting. I am not a bot
Great video as usual 👌
Can we use'em as breakwaters off Great Yarmouth? They'd look nicer than sunken ships and oil rigs.
Probably not strong enough. And after some erosion glass fibre in the water contaminating everything... Well, I'd think about that.
Back to not strong enough: years ago I've seen an experiment that aimed to harness river/tide energy in the Hudson. The turbine was small (experiment), and hours or some days later as they lifted the turbine out all blades were torn apart. Water is much stronger.
your audio is still far too quiet :(
What about laminated wood turbine blades? Would it be possible? Thanks for Great informations.
Only if you want very small, not very powerful wind turbines.
Windmills rock
This sounds a lot like the idea that Mercedes came up with to use biodegradable plastics to insulate wiring from 1991-96 with huge problems causing many vehicles to be recalled due to problems with the insulation degrading because it was BIODEGRADABLE not to mention the fact Toyota had a similar issue using a similar product that caused rats to eat the insulation because it was made from soy, and do you really want a 5ton blade falling or flying off because it's degraded or been eaten?
I'm all for wind turbines but this seems like a stupid idea for large turbines.
Not sure, but I'm thinking if I would really want that...
Why don't they make them out of aluminum, actually? Not strong enough, I guess?
Aluminum is soft and malleable enough to bend or break if you tried to make it into that long and thin of a wind blade, and repeatedly being flexed by winds would likely cause it to crack and fail over time anyway. It's also expensive, and there is a litmited world production of it per year from the more efficient mining sites. While it is light for a metal, it is still heavier/denser than a comperable support structure made from carbon polymers.
I am sorry but this is not that well informed. I have been designing blades for over 40 years including many different materials including natural (biological) and 'recyclable' prototypes. There are underlying problems with recycling blades - at least anywhere near a circular economy. The materials have to be very high stiffness to weight ratio which means virgin resins ( or solvated at 400+degC) and well-aligned long fibres. You don't get that with any recyclate. Also there is simply not a big enough volume of material (surprising, seeing the size of the blades I know) to match the reuse industries. I hate to poor cold water on this but only relatively short blades e.g 15m not 100m + today, can be made of material which has not got this high stiffness to weight requirement. Finally, although we can and should find uses for old blades not landfill - the mere fact of the clean energy developed by wind turbines (6-9 months of generation displaces all the greenhouse gases that would be used with fossil fuels iin the extraction, manufacture and erection of the turbine). Extending their lives is a good idea and very possible with modern drone technology. Side comment: Hardly any blades get 120degC + postcure (Vestas did but no longer) as mentioned. Usually 60-80degC or even room temperature cure and no post cure.
@@Windmillmark Damn you!
Don’t bring physics and engineering facts to our feel-good story!
😠😠
In all seriousness. Thank you for sharing your knowledge here.
Vegetable matter will never replace steel & fiberglass.
The world does indeed need more varied sources of low-pollution energy. However windmills have serious limitations & problems -they are not a panacea.
The video isn't about recycling old wind turbine blades into new wind turbines blades though. He specifically mentions that with this new technique they would be recycled into something else. Does it then still seem that farfetched to you?
Not quite sure I followed you here. So, you say "well-aligned long fibres", the technique presented here does not achieve that? Following: "You don't get that with any recyclate". You mean recycled material won't be good enough? If I understood the video well they are not aiming for that, only create the blades and than recycle them into something else.
My friend who is PhD keeps telling me that blades have a small working range due to a cube law but I can find anything I can understand on the internet
He specifically said that the material can not be reused to make new turbines. So I don't know what you are going on about.