Climate Change Weekly, The Heartland Institute
Climate Change Weekly previously examined a serious but rarely fully discussed problem with solar and wind industrial facilities: end-of-life waste.
This is not a problem for the distant future but for now. Many early wind turbines and solar panels are nearing their end of useful life, or even being replaced early as new, more-efficient panels and more-powerful turbines become available. In addition, emergency situations are causing further waste, such as hailstorm damage in Texas in 2024 and more recent damages in Indiana and Illinois, where vast industrial solar facilities were destroyed by storms, including hail and tornados, taking the facilities offline and creating a clean-up problem, with many nearby residents and communities expressing concern about potentially toxic chemicals leaching from the shattered panels.
In a 2023 post, I noted that a few media outlets—very few—had begun to recognize and acknowledge the mounting (pun fully intended, when you consider the huge piles of turbine blades, shafts, and panels) and pressing problem of what to do with wind and solar waste.
Recycling panels is challenging and expensive. It costs $30 to recycle each solar panel, to recover between $3.00 and $8.00 worth of minerals, metal, and glass. By contrast, it costs approximately $1.00 per panel to ship used panels to a landfill, and slightly more to ship inefficient used panels for reuse in developing countries overseas, shifting the waste problems elsewhere.
Because of the economics, less than one in ten solar panels are recycled. With millions more panels being installed each year, the problem is growing.
“The reason you do not see more companies doing solar panel recycling is because the economics don’t make sense,” A. J. Orben, vice president of We Recycle Solar, told GreenBiz back in 2023 when I first reported on the problem. “It costs more to break a panel down and recover the raw materials than what the raw materials themselves are worth.”
The waste problem tied to industrial wind is even greater. Although the metal in the towers and machinery can be recycled, it it difficult to do anything useful with the massive blades other than shred them into small bits for select uses, which is very expensive. It costs between $440,000 and $675,000 per unit to decommission and dispose of each onshore wind turbine from base to blade, with the process of dismantling offshore wind turbines topping $1 million, according to estimates. The value of the material from the towers and gear boxes is about $28,000 per unit, or far less than a tenth of the cost of dismantling. As a result, the metal, gears, concrete, and other materials often wind up in landfills, as do the composite blades after they’ve been crushed at great expense and with large emissions of carbon dioxide from the machinery used to haul and crush them. The blades are mostly landfilled or just left to decompose slowly above ground, wasting considerable space.
Five years ago, journalist Duggan Flanakin described the disposal methods and the problems the industry faced then, which have only grown along with the number and size of turbines:
A separate tractor-trailer is needed to haul each blade to a landfill, and cutting them up requires powerful specialized equipment. With some 8,000 blades a year already being removed from service just in the United States, that’s 32,000 truckloads over the next four years; in a few years, the numbers will be five times higher.
Some wind energy companies cut the huge blades into short sections before sending them to landfills, because most landfills lack cutting tools. Today’s turbine blades are 20 percent longer and their towers up to 200 feet taller than most of those currently being landfilled.
Turbine disposal costs are upwards of $400,000 apiece [HSB note: see the updated, larger cost figure above]. That means $24 billion to dispose of the 60,000 turbines currently in use in the U.S. The cost and the toll on existing landfills will rise as more, longer, heavier blades reach their end of life.
Over the next 20 years, the U.S. alone could have to dispose of 720,000 tons of waste blade material. Yet a 2018 report predicted a 15% drop in U.S. landfill capacity by 2021, with only some 15 years’ capacity remaining. We will have to permit entirely new landfills simply to handle wind turbine waste—on top of mountains of solar and battery waste.
Not every landfill is certified to handle wind turbine waste, and many that are have decided to refuse to do so because the cost in terms of space is just too great. Closing landfills early because there is no more room in the pit or pile is expensive, requiring communities to find new landfills or other ways to dispose of waste. Setting aside so much space in public landfills for companies already profiting from huge government support, with the costs borne by taxpayers and communities, makes less and less sense for local governments.
That has led wind profiteers to a different “solution”: piling up decommissioned turbines on open land aboveground. Thousands of acres are covered by turbines left to decompose over time, with unknown environmental impact, on land useful for purposes other than wind junkyards. This practice is controversial, and state and local governments are increasingly fighting the wind industries’ growing number of unregulated piles of unusable waste.
In 2023, I noted some in the media had started to report on the waste problem, but such coverage and analysis has waned until recently. Academics and analysts have lately begun to show renewed interest, perhaps because the mounting problem has become impossible even for those in their ivory towers and board rooms to ignore.
The London School of Economics (LSE) recently reported on Australia’s solar waste problem. Although recognizing the problem is the first step to fixing it, the LSE article unfortunately offers no new solutions: it calls for governments to force solar companies to take back old solar panels for reuse or recycling. That’s all well and good, except it doesn’t address the cost of doing so, which is why they do so little of it at present. With the cost of recycling and reuse so much higher than that of simply landfilling the waste, forcing solar companies to do so means they will simply pass that cost on to consumers or ratepayers, such as by adding a disposal fee for each panel. With solar still being more expensive than traditional sources of energy, this will only make already fast-rising power bills even more costly.
Maybe Australia isn’t facing the affordability crisis that residents of the United States are concerned about, but I doubt it, since credible estimates suggest Australians should expect to see their power bills rise by 24 percent by mid-2026 alone. Adding large solar disposal fees to ratepayers’ bills, even if hidden or somehow innocuously labeled, doesn’t seem like a good way to ensure lower prices—or politicians’ re-electability—unless Australian voters are different from those in the United States, where opinion polls show an unwillingness to pay higher energy prices to fight climate change.
The LSE is not the only academic institution to acknowledge the problem of the renewable energy waste stream, however belatedly. A recent article posted in the Harvard Business Review (HBR), titled “The Dark Side of Solar Power,” details how subsidies and efficiency improvements are leading many consumers to purchase solar panels for the first time, and others to replace their existing solar panels, with more-efficient models, before the subsidies run out. The result: a glut, not temporary but long-term, in unwanted solar panels.
The authors of the HBR analysis write,
If early replacements occur as predicted by our statistical model, they can produce 50 times more waste in just four years than IRENA anticipates. …
Alarming as they are, these stats may not do full justice to the crisis, as our analysis is restricted to residential installations. With commercial and industrial panels added to the picture, the scale of replacements could be much, much larger.
The industry’s current circular capacity is woefully unprepared for the deluge of waste that is likely to come. The financial incentive to invest in recycling has never been very strong in solar. While panels contain small amounts of valuable materials such as silver, they are mostly made of glass, an extremely low-value material. …
As a result, solar’s production boom has left its recycling infrastructure in the dust. …
The direct cost of recycling is only part of the end-of-life burden, however. Panels are delicate, bulky pieces of equipment usually installed on rooftops in the residential context. Specialized labor is required to detach and remove them, lest they shatter to smithereens before they make it onto the truck. In addition, some governments may classify solar panels as hazardous waste, due to the small amounts of heavy metals (cadmium, lead, etc.) they contain. This classification carries with it a string of expensive restrictions—hazardous waste can only be transported at designated times and via select routes, etc.
Like the LSE article, the HBR analysis identifies the problem but its solutions fall far short: make recycling great, as if there were a magic way of doing so without massive government subsidies or forced industry retrieval and treatment, the costs of which will ultimately fall on consumers.
Government subsidies and mandates created the renewable waste problem. The solution to this is not more expensive, misguided, government mandates or subsidies, but ending wind and solar incentives and mandates, which are solely responsible for the huge waste stream, including the land disrupted by mining and the toxins endemic to wind and solar power throughout the supply chain including mining, refining, construction, installation, decommissioning, and disposal.
Sources: CFACT; Harvard Business Review; London School of Economics; Climate Change Weekly