By Greg Johnson

February 16, 2021 - The slow, steady turning of thousands of wind turbines continues to pace a revolution in the U.S. domestic energy generation portfolio, or perhaps millions of small revolutions.

With wind, solar and other green sources of electricity now making up the majority of America’s power generation, states are facing an increasingly worrisome dilemma of dealing with the massive amounts of waste created by the wind industry.

Now that wind has emerged as the nation’s fastest-growing energy sector, the gold standard for green energy is revealing a dirty secret of its own with massive amounts of industrial waste.

Although made of fiberglass to reduce weight and cost, the huge blades that rotate the turbines can be longer than the wing of a large jumbo jet and weigh more than 5 tons each. As the industry adds thousands of new turbines a year, the problem of disposing of worn-out parts and blades has escalated, especially for local municipalities.

When photos of thousands of used wind turbine blades at the Casper landfill went viral last year, local and state officials took notice, said state Speaker of the House Eric Barlow, R-Gillette. That’s because relatively small local governments like the ones in Wyoming can’t handle adding that volume of waste in their landfills for long.

As federal policies and tax incentives continue to spur wind development, Wyoming’s unique weather landscape will continue to make the Cowboy State a leader in building and expanding wind farms. And as residents have expressed concern about the impact those farms can have on landfills, Barlow was drawn to a simple potential solution.

He suggested burying the blades in the huge Powder River Basin coal pits as companies reclaim the land.

“Now, the state of Wyoming and communities pay to dig holes to bury refuse,” Barlow said. “I don’t know that we need to subsidize that for every material. This material is one that if we can get the transit situation down, we wouldn’t fill our municipal landfills with industrial waste.”

That’s what prompted Barlow to propose House Bill 129 in the last legislative session, which passed. The bill allows private coal producers to use inert waste created by the wind industry as fill for reclamation of the mines. Because the turbine blades are fiberglass and contain no harmful chemicals, there’s no danger to the environment to bury them in the pits.

“These are very difficult, high-cost recyclable materials to deal with, and they’re inert,” he said. “They’re not going to leech into the groundwater or anything.”

What they could do is give some struggling coal companies another way to make a little money while dealing with their reclamation obligations, Barlow said. Along the way, the state would get a 25% cut of anything the companies make on taking in wind energy waste.

“I’m not under any delusion this is going to change the prospect of a coal mine’s earnings,” he said. “It’s unfortunate we have coal mines slowing down, but every little bit counts.”

Barlow also hasn’t missed the irony involved with using coal mines to ease a problem for an industry that’s helping drive coal out of business.

“There is a little irony that the waste from the green energy is being disposed of by the fossil fuel industry,” he said.

The idea is one of those rare government proposals that could be as simple as it sounds. It’s also rare in that it has the support of both the Wyoming Mining Association and the Powder River Basin Resource Council, an environmental watchdog group.

While an interesting idea in theory, only time will tell if coal companies will participate, said Travis Deti, executive director for the Wyoming Mining Association.