cs100

The wind industry has never had an exit plan. Global wind capacity passed 1,299 gigawatts last year, across 138 countries. The first turbines from the 1990s and early 2000s are already coming down. Nobody legislated for what happens next. The build side has its own unpriced cost. Bigger turbines increasingly run on rare earth magnets, and most of the world's rare earth processing runs through Baotou, China. The tailings dam there has no waterproof liner, is now too big to retrofit one, and leaches thorium and heavy metals into groundwater every rainy season. Farmers nearby report dying crops and livestock. Reported local cancer rates have been put as high as 70 times the national average. None of that shows up in a turbine's operating emissions, and it doesn't stop once the blade ships. Blades are the problem. They're built from composite specifically engineered to survive two decades of hurricane-force stress. That toughness is exactly why they don't recycle. One US landfill in Wyoming has buried over 1,100 of them since 2019, each one sawn into three pieces and stacked up to 30 feet deep. NREL's own modelling says that without a change in policy or tech, up to 78% of decommissioned blades will end up landfilled. Globally we're heading for something like 40 million tonnes of blade waste by 2050. Europe only agreed a voluntary landfill ban this January, and it still isn't law. Most US states allow it outright. Most other wind markets have no blade-specific rule at all. Underground, standard practice removes the top metre of a foundation and leaves the rest, often hundreds of tonnes of concrete and steel, buried forever. To be clear though, this isn't an argument against wind power. It's an argument that governments spent two decades approving the exciting part, the part that got them pats on the back and won the approval of the certain groups, and left the ending for someone else to figure out. That bill is arriving now, and there still isn't a proper plan for most of it. Foresight was cheap in 2005. It's expensive now.