Wyoming recently came up with a new way to get rid of old wind turbine blades. The state got the green light from the feds in January – or so everyone thought.
Let’s rewind to mid-January during the Wyoming legislative session.
“After three and a half years we finally have approval from the Office of Surface Mines to allow the disposal of turbine blades and towers in coal mines,” said Todd Parfitt, Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality’s (DEQ) director, to state lawmakers on Jan. 15.
The idea is when a Wyoming surface coal mine is done operating, the expired fiberglass blades can be used to fill the giant hole in the ground. What to do with huge blades is a growing issue nationwide, as they’re a lot for city landfills to take on. And refilling surface mines requires a lot of dirt, so using blades could lessen the dirt burden. Wyoming saw this potential solution as a win-win.
Wyoming Mining Association’s executive director Travis Deti applauded the rule change at the same meeting in mid-January. He’d been waiting years for it to go into effect.
“This last administration has not been the easiest to work with, so we're tickled that this has finally been approved,” Deti said.
But five days later, that changed. The rule was swept up in the federal regulatory freeze implemented by Pres. Trump when he took office on Jan. 20.
This required federal agencies to largely not propose any new rules and withdraw any proposed rules until further review and guidance was given. This also included “any rules that have been published in the Federal Register, or any rules that have been issued in any manner but have not taken effect.” The latter was true for the turbine blade disposal rule, as it was set to take effect Feb. 12, 2025.
Agencies had 60 days to review and “consider reevaluating pending petitions involving such rules.”
A federal regulatory freeze occasionally happens when a new administration takes office. For example, there was a freeze when Trump first took office in 2017 and when Biden took office in 2021.
“However, the scope of President Trump’s memorandum—against the backdrop of the frenetic regulatory activity of the post-2024 election Biden administration—means that this memorandum may carry meaningful impact for a number of regulations that companies are already taking steps to comply with,” according to an update from the global law firm Gibson Dunn.
At the time, E&E news reported that the freeze could come down hard on Biden-era environmental and energy rules. This was later backed up by an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) March 12 press release titled, “EPA Launches Biggest Deregulatory Action in U.S. History.”
Ultimately, Wyoming DEQ announced the turbine rule survived and is now unpaused, meaning Wyoming can now backfill surface mines with turbine blades.
