In the small community of Louisiana, Missouri, it’s not uncommon to see what looks like massive white wings traveling down the road, strapped to flatbed tractor-trailers. Once a bustling commercial port, the historic Mississippi River town 90 miles north of St. Louis has become a hub for an unusual commodity: used wind turbine blades. Shipments from nearly every corner of the U.S. arrive daily at the Veolia North America recycling plant, the last stop for turbine blades at the end of their lifespan.
As she stood in the plant’s gravel parking lot on Monday, Rose Collard pointed to two sections of a 150-foot turbine blade from Massena, Iowa, weighing a combined 20,000 pounds. “This is one of the biggest blades that we get,” said Collard, an environmental health and safety specialist at the recycling facility. The U.S. wind energy industry has grown at a record pace in recent years, with dozens of new projects popping up across the country. Missouri, Illinois and Iowa accounted for a substantial share of that growth in 2020, ranking among the states with the highest new wind power capacity. But this thriving industry is now facing a challenge: what to do with old wind turbine blades when it’s time to replace them.
Though most turbine blades are designed to last at least 20 years, some are discarded much sooner, wind technology engineer Derek Berry said. “Some are catastrophically damaged by things like a lightning strike,” said Berry, who is based at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado. “Or you might have a large wind farm that was built 10 or 15 years ago and a company wants to take down the older, shorter blades and put up longer blades that produce more energy.”