[Bric3d]

From what I understood the main ecological issue with wind turbine are more due to the blades than the tower, I wonder if they're doing something on that side.

[elric]

Those blades are a major engineering challenge. Have a friend who's a materials scientist who works on those blades. Those things experience crazy stresses because they're so huge. Failures can be pretty catastrophic. I don't think the ecological issue with those blades is all that relevant given the huge ecological benefits of wind power over any other form of electricity generation.

[boxed]

Any? Solar and nuclear would like a word :P

[lkmill]

i partly agree, but the fact that those blades cant even be recycled [0] but are instead dug down in the ground after use will probably be an ecological issue relatively soon.

edit: [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb...

felt like i read that article yesterday. 5 years ago, wow. has any progress been made there?

[EasyMark]

there are a couple of catastrophic failure modes of those blades and it's some pretty insane footage. The one I saw I believe failed because the brake failed in a big wind storm

[jillesvangurp]

It's a relatively very minor challenge compared to burning massive amounts of gas, coal or oil for the same energy of the blades over the lifetime. The big picture is that wind turbines are a massive improvement over that.

There's a very minor challenge (compared to decades of coal/gas related emissions) of what happens to the blades after their useful life ends. Mostly you are just putting something that doesn't naturally degrade very well in a landfill where it sits and doesn't degrade very well. It might be leaking some toxic stuff slowly over a very long time. Compared to all absolutely massive amounts of other stuff we dump in landfills, what happens to the blades is probably not the most urgent thing to tackle from an ecological point of view.

Of course, windmill construction at scale involves a lot of steel, concrete, and blades. So if would can do the same job and perform well, that's still interesting to do. We take something that's already amazingly good and make it even better.

[wizardOfScience]

Check out these guys! https://voodin-blades.com/

[moffkalast]

We're officially back to classic wooden windmills.

[Onavo]

Maybe they can use cross-laminated wood or the compressed wood that was on hacker news the other day.

[goda90]

If you go smaller you can use wood for the blades too. Smaller doesn't scale as well, but if you design and build them right you can still get more energy than it takes to produce them: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2019/06/reinventing-the-sm...

[DocTomoe]

It's that, and the tower's concrete base (which is huge, and virtually indestructible, which means no-one is going to remove it. It'll stay in the ground forever, essentially sealing it (even if there is a meter of dirt covering it). See [1] for a picture to understand the dimensions:

[1] https://www.sserenewables.com/news-and-views/2021/09/concret...