Company executives fight lawsuit over junked wind-turbine blades 

The top executives of a company accused of abandoning junked wind-turbine blades across Iowa say they shouldn’t be held liable for their companies’ actions.

Last fall, the State of Iowa sued a Washington-state company and its executives for allegedly dumping tons of old wind-turbine blades around Iowa, in violation of the state’s solid-waste laws.

Global Fiberglass Solutions accumulated about 400 old wind turbine blades near Ellsworth along U.S. Interstate 35. (Photo by Jared Strong/Iowa Capital Dispatch)

The lawsuit alleges that for over seven years, Global Fiberglass Solutions failed to properly dispose of decommissioned wind-turbine blades and stockpiled them at multiple locations in Iowa. The lawsuit, filed in Iowa District Court for Jasper County, seeks payment of civil penalties and a court injunction to prevent any additional violations of the state’s solid-waste laws.

Global Fiberglass Solutions and its CEO, Donald Lilly, are named as defendants in the case, as is Ronald Albrecht, one of Global’s corporate officers.

In recent court filings, attorneys for Lilly and Albrecht have argued the two men should be dismissed from the case, saying the court lacks jurisdiction in the matter because the two have never been to Iowa and were not “personally involved in the transactions and conduct” at issue.

In response, lawyers for the state are arguing that one need not set foot in Iowa to be subject to the court’s jurisdiction over non-residents. The state claims Lilly and Albrecht managed and directed the activities of Global Fiberglass Solutions and its affiliates, GFS Holding, GFS Trust and GFSI-MHE.

As the two highest-ranking officers of Global Fiberglass Solutions, Lilly and Albrecht “are in a position of responsibility to influence corporate decision making,” the state alleges, adding that the two men “could have affected the companies’ actions or inactions that led to the violations of Iowa’s solid waste laws.”

A trial setting conference in the case is scheduled for Jan. 21.

The lawsuit claims that General Electric, which provides parts and equipment for wind turbines, and MidAmerican Energy, which owns wind turbines in Iowa, each hired Global in 2017 to recycle their decommissioned wind-turbine blades.

MidAmerican and General Electric paid Global “millions of dollars,” the lawsuit alleges, to cut up, transport, and recycle the blades. Typically, such blades are about 170 feet long and weigh roughly 16 tons.

Rather than recycle the blades, the lawsuit claims Global instead dumped roughly 1,300 of them at four locations around the state: Newton, Atlantic, and a site in Ellsworth that was used to store blades that were originally dumped in Fort Dodge.

In December 2020, the lawsuit alleges, Global agreed to a consent order obligating the company to “take a number of concrete steps to purchase, install, and commence using recycling equipment” to process a certain percentage of the blades according to a series of deadlines.

The company was also required to post a $2 million surety bond to defray state expenses should the DNR be forced to remove and dispose of the blades because of Global’s lack of compliance with the consent order.

The DNR then agreed to extend the deadline for posting the bond until April 1, 2021.

Global never posted the bond, according to the lawsuit, and so the DNR ordered Global to remove all of the blades scattered at the disposal sites. Global didn’t comply with that order and in July 2021, the matter was referred to the Iowa attorney general’s office for legal action.

The state’s lawsuit against Global was filed in September 2024, three years after that referral. It seeks a civil penalty of up to $5,000 per day for each day the company was out of compliance with Iowa’s solid-waste laws.