Towns the size of Sweetwater normally don’t need many graveyards. The rural community of about 11,000 people is located in the impossibly flat plains west of Abilene and is best known for the 2,000 wind turbines that surround the area. More wind energy is produced in Nolan County than almost anywhere else on the planet, but since this place has given birth to such a staggering number of turbines, it now accommodates more than its fair share of dead ones, too.
Just south of town, on the west side of Highway 70, hundreds of fiberglass wind turbine blade chunks are piled into a 10-acre pasture. They have been cut into three pieces, laid down and piled up like empty straw wrappers discarded by giants. This is one of Texas’ first wind turbine graveyards. Fittingly, a second one has emerged across the street from Sweetwater’s town cemetery, this one more than 25 acres in size. As wind turbine blades increasingly reach the end of their useful lives, normally 25 to 30 years, more of these sites are expected to pop up across the state and nation. So far, no one has figured out a good way to get rid of the blades.And in the next decade, many of the 180,000 blades currently churning in U.S. airspace—more than one-quarter of which are in Texas alone—will come down.
A sign on the chain link fence separating the heap from the highway tells motorists that the blades are being prepared for recycling. That’s easier said than done. The blades, which are mostly made of fiberglass, carbon fiber, resin, and balsa wood, can’t be melted down and remanufactured like recycled aluminum cans or glass bottles. Blades get “recycled” by being shredded and mixed into construction materials or burned for cement production. Otherwise, they get hauled off to landfills. Each recycling process carries an environmental toll: a harsh reality for an industry that aims to replace coal by producing cleaner energy. The problem will come to a head in Texas, which leads the nation in wind energy production.
