The Sweetwater Wind Turbine Blade Dumpsites

On Saturday (Feb 7) Robert Bryce published an article about the massive financial losses Stellantis (formerly Chrysler) has incurred by manufacturing vehicles customers don't want (EVs) rather than vehicles people actually do want. By simply reporting facts Bryce has been an ongoing thorn in the side for automakers and others married to the Green Transition.

He ends the "free" segment of his substack post with this paragraph:

Here’s a closer look at the Stellantis announcement, along with two updated spreadsheets showing the losses for each automaker. I also have two short items, including NERC’s warning about electricity shortages and the Texas AG’s long-overdue lawsuit against the owner of two notorious wind turbine blade dumpsites in Sweetwater.

I'm not a paid subscriber (yet) so I had to do my own research about the Sweetwater dumpsites for wind turbine blades.

The wind turbine blade dumpsites in Sweetwater, Texas are located in Nolan County, often refrred to as the "Wind Energy Capital of North America" due to he large wind farms nearby. Large stockpiles of decommissioned wind turbine blades that have been accumulating there since around 2017. These are not traditional landfills but open, unpermitted storage sites where blades have been dumped rather than recycled as originally planned.

A company called Global Fiberglass Solutions (GFS), based out in Washington, began collecting used blades from wind farms across the U.S. The plan was to transport them to Sweetwater, shred or process them into reusable materials (like composites for products such as railroad ties or flooring), and recycle them. However, the recycling operation largely failed to materialize, leading to massive accumulations instead.

There are two main sites in and around Sweetwater. One site is within or near the city limits, notably across from the historic Sweetwater Cemetery on West Alabama Avenue which is often described as a "blade boneyard" or "graveyard." (Maybe a new reality show could be created called Sweetwater City Limits? The other site is south of town, along Highway 70.

The blades are typically cut into sections before being transported.  They purportedly cover about 40 acres of land. (One site is about 30 acres and the other around 10.) The sites have around 3,000 blades and related parts like nacelles. (Nacelles are streamlined, enclosed housings for the machinery found in the wind turbine head.)

Recent reports (as of this year) indicate the sites contain around 487,000 cubic yards of solid waste. The problem is that these are illegal/unpermitted disposal sites because they lack proper waste management permits. The blades, lying exposed, have been more than an eyesore. They are attracting vermin and rattlesnakes, posing safety hazards (e.g., to children before fencing was added), and were being declared a public nuisance by Nolan County as early as 2020.

In response the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) has issued orders and penalties (e.g., a 2022 agreed order with fines for unauthorized storage).

This week, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued Global Fiberglass Solutions and affiliates for violating solid waste disposal laws, seeking penalties, removal of the waste, and other relief. The state alleges the company illegally dumped and abandoned the materials, damaging land and threatening communities.

Considering the size of Texas, 40 acres doesn't seem like much. On the other hand, considering the size of Sweetwater (a little over 10,000 people) that is a lot of eyesore for one's back 40. (Fwiw, Sweetwater is 44 miles west of Abilene on Highway 20, or 194 miles west of Fort Worth.)

This situation highlights broader challenges with wind turbine blade disposal: the composite fiberglass material is difficult and expensive to recycle, leading some to end up in landfills elsewhere or in stockpiles like this. Sweetwater's case has drawn media attention as a prominent example of the "dark side" of wind energy end-of-life issues, in stark contrast to the town's wind-friendly identity.

For visuals of these sites (aerial views showing piles of massive white blade sections in fields), search for images of "Sweetwater Texas wind turbine blades" or similar terms. I borrowed this shot (above) from Texas Monthly without permission. If asked to pull it I shall. If you have an alternative image, send me a note and I will give you credit.

Wind turbine blades are extremely durable, made from fiberglass or carbon-fiber composites, which are hard to separate and not easily recyclable with conventional methods. Recycling blades is currently one of the industry's biggest challenges.

Find Robert Bryce here on Substack.

Goodness! This Brave New World Is Getting Pretty Scary -- Ice Storms, Hacking and More

So, the iced roads and freezing temps are now in day five down in Texas. For a decade we have been moving toward a greater interconnectedness of all our systems. The famed Internet of Things (IoT) was going to bring significant blessings and efficiencies to our lives. The current power outages in Texas are revealing some of the issues that will need to be hurdled if we are to enter the future with greater confidnce.

I've been worrying about practical matters with EVs for quite some time. Like, how do you recharge when the power is out? If we don't upgrade the power grid as fast as we force people into EVs, what then? We all know that ideas can be legislated faster than they can be implemented. Executive orders can be signed in a minute, with practical implementations half-baked and nowhere near ready. 

My personal big fear with EVs and automated cars has to do with tech. What happens when you have a problem? The history of the automobile includes a history of recalls. Recalls are not an isolated phenomenon. The industry is awash in them. In 2016 there were nearly 53 million recalls. I didn't even know they sold that many cars in 2016. (This was an unusual year because of the Takata airbag problem that drove the company into bankruptcy.)

The Texas power grid collapse, however, should be a wakeup call. If we are going to have an electric car future, let's make sure we have backup power grids and systems in place.  

* * * *

Another disturbing news item this month is the hacking that's been going on, and our inability to stop it. In Florida, somebody hacked the water supply of a city near Tampa and released 100-fold a chemical that is normally used to treat water, but now turned it harmful if not deadly.

A much more disturbing hack involved the breach of a number of federal agencies in 2020. There's a Wikipedia page on the cyberattack that penetrated thousands of organizations globally. The scary thing is that our government purportedly has the best cybersecurity protecting its assets, yet the cyberattacks went undetected for months.

The U.S. Senate intelligence committee is meeting next week to determine what happened and how. I mean no disrespect but how do these elected officials make decisions on these bleeding edge issues when they were essentially trained as lawyers, not IT experts. So they bring in experts, but how do they know which experts to listen to? It reminds me of Cate Blanchett as Queen Elizabeth having to make decisions while being given contradictory counsel. 

I suppose this is not really a new phenomenon with regards to kings and presidents. This is, in part, what prompted me to write this piece titled Who Are Your Experts?  I originally addressed this to leaders on a much smaller scale, but the main point applies to all.

* * * 

And then we have the new strains of Covid with multiple experts weighing in until a single voice gets approved and the rest get cancelled. Times have changed. Are we no longer permitted to question conventional wisdom?

I grew up in the generation whose motto was Question Authority. Now that we/they are in authority, we're NOT allowed to question authority? 

Miscellaneous Observations from the Road

“There are no short cuts to any place worth going.” ~ Beverly Sills

I just watched an interesting scene play out. I had just finished booting up my laptop here at a Starbucks inside a Dallas grocery store when I overheard the very last portion of job interview. The interviewee, a light-skinned Hispanic looking woman, had just finished gushing that she was so excited because she had always wanted to work in this grocery store. My first thought was that her words sounded so coached and scripted as if they were directly lifted from a job-interview manual, How To Get The Job You've Always Wanted or Interviewing 101.

The interviewer, a tall, middle-aged Caucasian with slender build, then said that she had the job, upon which she became exceedingly enthused as if she won the big prize on a game show. He then added, as if bring a little reality into the picture, a reminder that she was starting in an entry level position at minimum wage, which played out like a scene from Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed. (Sure enough, the drug test discussion was next.)

It's a buyer's market for employers. That is, a buyers market for those companies which are remaining solvent. In Texas this year it is now estimated that nearly 300,000 jobs will be lost, pushing the unemployment rate up to 8%. These stats remind me of the line from Joni Mitchell's Big Yellow Taxi, "Don't it always go to show, you don't know what you've got till its gone."

Personally, I am grateful for my own position, and doing everything in my power to help my company remain strong and to grow. You don't have to be in the sales or marketing to help your company grow. You can make a contribution wherever you sit, or stand. Accurate accounting, responsive customer service, attention to product quality... every part contributes to the whole.

I'm happy for the young woman who got the job here today. (She's still celebrating.) And if you're employed, getting a regular paycheck, I am happy for you, too. Give thanks.

The Fighting Never Ends

"I don't think this is a very bright page in American history." ~ Robert Kennedy

I've been reading a biography of James K. Polk called... Polk. He's not someone the average citizen really knows much about, despite being a U.S. president. He pretty much gets lumped in with a host of other unknowns like Harrison, Tyler, Taylor and everyone's favorite unknown Millard Fillmore.

Polk really did make some significant moves, nearly doubling the size of the United States through aggressive negotiations with England to take Oregon and a dubious war with Mexico to secure Texas to California. The book is loaded with anecdotes and details which I certainly have no space for, but the net net is this: Polk, the book, is a worthy read.

In my junior year in high school we had a great set of team teachers who provided a more complex view of U.S. history than we'd previously encountered. Our studies of the Mexican war were especially interesting, told from the point of view of Mexico. It wasn't pretty. Especially when the philosophical underpinnings were melded with the religious notion of Manifest Destiny. It is God's will that we steal these lands, because we will put them to better use than they can.

As the war drums began to sound, a homely looking skinny representative from Illinois stood up in Congress and called the president on the carpet saying this war had no right to be. Mr. Lincoln's arguments failed to win the day, and the war was carried to its ignominious conclusion.

Like many wars, the Mexican war continued to be "fought" long after the bullets stopped flying, hence Bobby Kennedy's comment during a trip to Indonesia in 1962. Upon hearing this remark, Vice President Lyndon Johnson released his own volley of venom, defending the history books by calling our Texas land grab "a bright page indeed."

Ironically, the former Texas senator helped immerse us in yet another controversial war, this one in Southeast Asia, a war that nearly split the country. More than forty years later, this war too is being debated, its motivations and costs and value heavily examined and re-interpreted. Unpopular war, yes. Yet many still defend its ends, despite the manner in which it was executed.

The 21st century introduced yet another controversial war. Just last week I saw an article saying this war, maligned as it is, will look different fifty to a hundred years from now. I do not wish to comment on that. My only comment here is that I'm willing to guess that fifty to one hundred years from now, we will still not have consensus, and somewhere someone will be arguing about it with someone else who disagrees with them.

Oh well...

One more trivial piece I learned from this biography about our second president from Tennessee. He was a slave owner. Almost immediately after leaving office he died, probably from the stress of this demanding occupation. In his will he freed his slaves... which would go into effect when his wife passed away. Unfortunately for the slaves, his wife lived 42 more years. Fortunately for the slaves, that skinny fellow from Illinois became president in twelve years, and declared those slaves free men in 15. Such are the twists and turns of history.