America has a quickly growing waste problem. I’m talking about how to dispose of or treat the vast, rapidly increasing amount of waste tied to the wind and solar energy, which the federal and various state governments have obsessed over, subsidized, and mandated.
This is not a theoretical problem of the distant future. It is a tangible problem right now.
Many wind turbines and solar panels are nearing the end of their useful life, or have already been 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. More recently, damage in Indiana and Illinois, where vast industrial solar facilities were destroyed by storms, including hail and tornadoes, took the facilities offline and created a clean-up problem. Nearby residents and communities have expressed concern about potentially toxic chemicals leaching from the shattered panels.
Recycling solar panels is challenging and expensive. It costs $30 to recycle a solar panel, to recover between $3 and $8 worth of minerals, metal, and glass. By contrast, it costs approximately $1 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 10 solar panels is recycled. With millions more panels being installed each year, the problem is growing, as was recently recognized in studies published by the London School of Economics in the Harvard Business Review (HBR).
“If early replacements occur as predicted by our statistical model, they can produce 50 times more waste in just four years than IRENA anticipates,” the HBR article notes. “The industry’s current circular capacity is woefully unprepared for the deluge of waste that is likely to come.
“While panels contain small amounts of valuable materials such as silver, they are mostly made of glass, an extremely low-value material.” HBR continues. “The direct cost of recycling is only part of the end-of-life burden, however.
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The problem of solar panel disposal isn’t just limited to the volume of the waste stream, but also how the panels must be handled.
“Panels are delicate, bulky pieces of equipment usually installed on rooftops in the residential context [with] [s]pecialized labor . . . required to detach and remove them, lest they shatter to smithereens before they make it onto the truck,” writes HBR. “In addition, some governments may classify solar panels as hazardous waste, due to the small amounts of heavy metals (cadmium, lead, etc.) they contain [resulting in] . . . expensive restrictions—hazardous waste can only be transported at designated times and via select routes, etc.”
As daunting as the current waste problem for solar panels is, the looming waste problem from industrial wind is even worse. Although the metal in the towers and machinery can be recycled, it is 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 $440,000 to $675,000 per unit to decommission and dispose of each onshore wind turbine from base to blade. Dismantling offshore wind turbines is even more expensive, topping $1 million per turbine. The value of the material from the towers and gear boxes is about $28,000 per unit, far less than a 10th of the cost of dismantling. As a result, the metal, gears, concrete, and other materials often end 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.
Five years ago, journalist Duggan Flanakin described the disposal methods and the obstacles 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,” Flanakin wrote. “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.
“Over the next 20 years, the U.S. alone could have to dispose of 720,000 tons of waste blade material,” said Flanakin. “Yet a 2018 report predicted a 15% drop in U.S. landfill capacity by 2021, with only some 15 years’ capacity remaining [meaning] [w]e 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 or solar waste, and many have decided to refuse to do so because it demands too much space.
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 is making less sense to local governments.
That has led wind and solar profiteers to a different “solution,” piling up decommissioned turbines and solar panels on open land. Thousands of acres are covered by turbines and panels left to decompose over time, with unknown environmental impact, on land useful for purposes other than wind and solar junkyards. This controversial practice has resulted in an increasing number of state and local governments imposing restrictions on the renewable energy industry’s growing number of unregulated piles of unsightly, chemical-laced waste.
The LSE article and the HBR analysis identify the problem, but their solution, forcing wind and solar companies to take back and recycle all their waste, is economically and politically unrealistic. It doesn’t make recycling cheaper, and the costs borne by the companies will simply be passed onto ratepayers and the public. This will make the energy affordability crisis Americans are rightly incensed about even worse. Making rising power bills even more expensive is not a winning electoral message for politicians, I suspect.
Government subsidies and mandates created the renewable waste problem. The solution is not more expensive, misguided government mandates or subsidies, but ending wind and solar incentives and mandates, which are responsible for the huge waste stream.
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., ([email protected]) is the Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at The Heartland Institute, a non-partisan, non-profit research organization based in Illinois.
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