Abandoned wind blades in Texas raise a question for Wyoming: who pays?

CHEYENNE, Wyoming — Wendy Volk, a real estate agent who married into a fifth-generation Wyoming ranching family, has spent the past year mapping the state’s proposed wind, solar, and transmission projects into a single corridor she calls the Wyoming wind wall. On the June 4 Kim Monson Show, broadcasting from Cheyenne hours before a rally at the State Capitol, Volk pointed past the turbines themselves to what happens when they stop turning. A field in West Texas, she said, shows the bill that can come due.

That field sits off Interstate 20 in Sweetwater, Texas. In a lawsuit filed earlier this year, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton accused Global Fiberglass Solutions and several affiliated companies of turning two sites there into unpermitted dumps holding more than 3,000 wind turbine blades and nacelles, the housings that cover a turbine’s machinery. The blades sprawl across nearly a million square feet, The Detroit News reported, each one originally as long as 200 feet and now cut into thirds. The state says that as of March 2025 the two sites held roughly 487,000 cubic yards of solid waste.

The company was supposed to recycle the blades, not store them. Global Fiberglass Solutions was paid by General Electric and other turbine makers to grind end-of-life blades into material for railroad ties and flooring, according to Chemical and Engineering News, but the blades kept arriving and the recycling never kept pace. Texas law requires a facility like it to recycle at least 75 percent of what it takes in each year. The state says the company never hit that mark after operations began in 2017, signed an agreed order in 2022 to stop accepting waste, and then ignored it.

Blades are the part of a wind turbine that resists recycling. More than 85 percent of a turbine, including its steel tower, copper wiring, and gearing, can be reclaimed; the blades cannot. They are glass and carbon fibers locked in a thermoset resin that burns rather than melts, which is why most retired blades are cut apart and buried. Thousands already sit in landfills across the Great Plains, including in Iowa, South Dakota, and Wyoming, and industry analysts expect roughly 43 million metric tons of blade waste worldwide by 2050. On the air, Volk said she had been told that nearly everything in a turbine can be recycled except the blades, and that some have proposed tucking the retired ones into abandoned mines.

The Sweetwater case is a recycling failure rather than a wind operator walking away from a reclamation bond, but it lands on the question Volk raised on the air: when the responsible party disappears, who funds the cleanup? Paxton is asking a Travis County court for civil penalties of $50 to $25,000 a day per violation, a sum the state says could run past $1 million, and for an order forcing the companies to haul everything to a licensed facility within 180 days, Fox 4 reported. A judgment is only as collectible as the defendant is solvent, and General Electric has its own lawsuit against the company for failing to deliver.

Kim Monson put the cost where she said it usually lands, on the everyday working people. Wind companies collect federal tax credits they can sell to other firms looking to lower a tax bill, she noted, which can make a project profitable even when the power it produces is not. Landowners who sign easements, she added, often give up more control of their property than they expect. In Kansas, she said, some ranchers are now left with idle turbines on their land and no lease payments after the operator went out of business.

Wyoming is not without rules for that day. Under the state’s Industrial Siting Act, a commercial wind project must file a reclamation and decommissioning plan and a separate financial assurance plan, approved by the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality and refreshed every five years, with the financial instrument in place before construction begins, according to the Wyoming Energy Authority’s wind permitting guide. Volk’s argument is that those assurances are only as good as the company standing behind them, and that the state should weigh the full corridor of projects, and the decommissioning promises attached to each, before approving the next wave.

Volk asked listeners to treat the buildout as a question of transparency rather than a verdict on renewable energy, and invited them to the rally at noon at the Wyoming State Capitol. The blades in Sweetwater, she suggested, are what a missing plan looks like 20 years on.

The Kim Monson Newsroom also reported from the rally itself, where ranchers and CFACT pressed Wyoming for a cumulative review of the wind wall.