Saturday's Energy Absurdity: When Wind Boosters Have Lost Texas Monthly, They're in Real Trouble

Saturday's Energy Absurdity: When Wind Boosters Have Lost Texas Monthly, They're in Real Trouble

[Follow me on Twitter/X at @EnergyAbsurdity]

The Texas wind industry has a problem. The detritus from deconstructed wind facilities is now piling up in such mass quantity all across West Texas that even the inveterate boosters of renewable energy at Texas Monthly magazine have finally decided they can no longer studiously ignore the story.

After cancelling a 40-year subscription to the magazine several years ago (I was a Day 1 subscriber at age 18 when the magazine debuted in 1974) due to its increasingly one-sided reporting, imagine my surprise when I got on Twitter one morning recently and saw a tweet with the photo accompanying this story at the top of my feed. It’s a photo of the massive graveyard that has grown just outside Sweetwater, Texas over the last decade, filled with the blades from wind units, most of which have broken down irreparably long before their advertised 25-year lifespan has arrived.

Mind you, this is just the blades, stored there by a non-U.S. firm called “Global Fiberglass,” whose spokesperson claims to TM that it has plans to begin an effort to recycle the blades “soon.” As the story notes, others who have inquired since the junkyard was established in 2017 have always been given the same “soon” answer, yet “soon” never seems to arrive.

Even worse, the junkyard in this photo is not the only blade graveyard negatively impacting Sweetwater’s environment. There is another one on the other side of town that covers 10 acres. Other, similar graveyards dot the landscapes of the gigantic West Texas region.

Even worse than that, thanks to strong lobbying by the wind industry and its supporting media boosters, Texas has no state laws that specifically regulate the retirement of its wind farms and the disposal of not just the blades, but the gigantic towers and turbines as well, although the Texas Council on Environmental Quality has issued fines on wind operators for violations of the state’s solid waste storage laws. None of the other big wind states in the U.S. have such regulations, either, so Texas is no exception.

Even worse than that is the fact that fiberglass is not the only component in these blades. They also contain rare earth elements that serve to make them lighter, and those elements can be toxic in certain quantities.

Yet, Texas and other states allow wind companies to operate on a de facto honor system where the disposal of their junk equipment is concerned. But, as everyone knows, there is no honor among thieves.

The spokesperson for Global Fiberglass promises TM that, if the reporters travel back to Sweetwater 9 months from now, the blade graveyard pictured here will be gone, and the story’s writers promise to do that. It’s a safe bet that the junkyard’s inventory will only grow larger by that time. A very, very safe bet, because it is far cheaper for these wind developers to deal with a little bad media every now and then than it is to do the right thing.

Only proper regulatory oversight by state agencies will ever change that reality.

That is all.