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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.

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lkmill 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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?

	▲	snarf21 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		There has been some but everything isn't fully scaled up yet. https://www.energy.gov/eere/wind/articles/carbon-rivers-make...

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boxed 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Any? Solar and nuclear would like a word :P

	▲	Tade0 11 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Solar actually has over twice the footprint of onshore wind, considering the energy needed to produce the panels, but it's irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, as all those mentioned sources, if they were to form the majority of the mix, would make electricity a much smaller chunk of the overall footprint than, say, food. In 2024 France electricity was responsible for an equivalent of 16.1Mt of CO2 - largely due to gas peaker plants, which together contributed to a single digit percentage of overall electricity consumption. That's 235kg of CO2 per person, or 2.5-7.5kg of beef in terms of environmental impact.
	▲	elric 12 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		That feels like a disingenuous take. If the composites in wind turbine blades are an environmental problem, then so is nuclear waste and so are the semiconductors in solar panels.