Can't they install electric heaters to thaw the ice off the windmill blades...?.....uh....Can't they install windmills to generate the power needed to run the electric heaters to thaw the ice off the windmill blades....uhh.....

Can't we charge David Suxuki with high treason and crimes against humanity?

And to add even more irony . . . all of these useless turbines are sucking electricity into them to keep the machinery warm.

Wind turbines"delivering" negative energy to the good taxpayers of New Brunswick.

The only thing that is keeping these fans up and not running is the embarrassment that would ensue among our precious politicians and their Eco freak commie pals.

Otherwise, that experiment is over.

It is over Eskimo, the courts should be filled with the Suzukis and Gores and their ilk, this SCAM has broke the western world. 12 jobs! how many jobs were created in Brazil, Denmark, Japan, building these eyesores, hundreds. Canada is just waking up to this SCAM, the monetary hangover is the current disaster. Tell me Mr Suzuki, how can a young family buy 400,000 worth of house and vehicles, without a job, or a job slinging fries, or one of 12 jobs tilting at windmills? No Mr. Suzuki let me inform you, people need OIL jobs and spinoff of OIL jobs to even hope to buy a house in this market you "MAGGOT", as you freely call the rest of us. Love to see imperial David, hang off a monkey board in 30 below with a 30 mph wind, that would soon weed the "maggot" from the men!

....snicker.

It's not the fault of Suzuki, Gore et al. The blame lies squarely on the shoulders of the politicians. Suzuki, Gore do not have the keys to the treasury nor do they have access to the force required to loot the tax/rate payer.

Why not go back to candle energy, seeing as we are devolving resource-wise.
What could two hundred million dollars buy? Maybe a better and proven energy source?

Ooh ooh they could burn barrels of oil underneath to help melt the ice!!

I've driven by that wind farm many times and it aggravates the hell out of me each and every time.

Glad to see your in a good mood Bartinsky ;-)...I share your anger.

I recently attended a Mark Steyn lecture where he said that the West started declining at the end of the 1950's...I share that view.

These windmills will be regarded as the last vestige of modern society gone mad IMO...After the "big correction" whatever and whenever that will be...After the next dark age, maybe.

Just the thought that Spain literally went bankrupt in the attempt to go all in alternative energy development when we know that oil was what catapulted mankind in the space age in a mere century is just mind boggling.

Who builds giant windmills NEAR THE OCEAN in CANADA and doesn't put a de-icing system in them? Are you kidding me? Only a committee of government employees could make a decision like that.

And we wonder why our country seems a lot more fracked up than it did when we were kids.

De-fund the morons soonest.

Where did all that snow and ice come from? I thought man was warming the globe and this shouldn't have happened!!

Phantom, I don't know how you can put a de-icing system on those things. Certainly that would have been a huge problem out on Lake Ontario.

Throwing ice shards of course is one of the hazards of these things. They can fly for at least half a kilometer.

Eskimo and Fred raise a good point. You cannot 'blackstart' a wind turbine. It will not function from a cold start unless it has current coming into it. What isn't measured is the excitation current being drawn by the turbine. If it's shutdown for high wind or no wind conditions, it's still drawing. So in very low or high wind conditions, it may actually be a load instead of a supply source. When the IESO produces its hourly production numbers and say the gross wind production is close to zero, net production may actually be negative. But this isn't recorded anywhere to my knowledge.

Not to worry - those turbines will be back on line soon. In the meantime all those customers of NB Power can use this as an opportunity to meditate on how foolish their society was to ever embark on non-renewable sources in the first place, and buy some carbon offsets until ethical electricity once again becomes available.

A $200-million wind farm in northern New Brunswick is frozen solid, cutting off a phantom supply of renewable energy for NB Power.

There - fixed it.

In real news Curveball admits he made it all up.

Cutting edge 19th century technology can be used to solve Canada's AGW gas emissions problem. Think what could be accomplished with the Conestoga wagon as a delivery vehicle for merchandise goods. Dalton McGuinty has a task force studying the issue; look for a promise to close all diesel trucking in Ont. by 2015.

cgh said: "Phantom, I don't know how you can put a de-icing system on those things. Certainly that would have been a huge problem out on Lake Ontario."

I'm thinking you would incorporate heating elements into the blades when they are laminated, or de-icing fluid tubes. Its no different than an aircraft wing in that regard.

I'm amazed they don't have that, myself. There are lots of wind farms on coasts, how do they manage icing in Sweden and Denmark? Or Scotland?

Jail Suzuki and the politicians who ignored "the science behind climate change".

...-

"Jail politicians who ignore climate science: Suzuki ***
David Suzuki has called for political leaders to be thrown in jail for ignoring the science behind climate change."

http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=290513

Bring in the de-icing crews... dang that will use jet fuel..

It's not the fault of Suzuki, Gore et al. The blame lies squarely on the shoulders of the politicians.
~potato

Mostly correct.
It has to be remembered that politicians rely on expert advice to make these policy decisions and all the "peer reviewed" experts said that winter was a thing of the past(which is why the turbines were designed w/o de-icers) and that the CAGW question was settled, argument over.

A lot of the blame lies with the expert climate science liars.(CRU, NASA, IPCC, and touts like Suzuki, Gore, Jones, Mann, Hansen et al.)

cgh, you seem to be knowledgable. How does the excitation power thing work?

Would EDF Suez have onsite standby power (diesel generators)?

Or would NB Power provide it by some backhaul arrangement?

Is it bought from the US on some interconnect deal (at high cost) Anybody have any insight?

Don't forget the slimestream media guilt in this major economic boondoggle.

And the whackademics.

Defund them all.

Charge them with fraud.

I spotted part of their problem. The spokeswoman for the company is under the ompression that "cold and dry" is the norm in winter in Atlantic Canada.

Ummmm, this is the east coast of Canada in winter. Hands up any other locals who ever considered our winters "dry".

Who would of thunk that a wind coming in off of the OCEAN might contain some moisture?

Just wait until it thaws and they have to start dealing with corrosion from the salt.

NW of bathurst puts them in mining country, I think. Should be some uranium lying around for a small reactor, or something. With noreasters, alberta clippers, and colorado lows slamming the east coast every week its no wonder its frozen.

$200 million to produce 99 Mw!? That's over $2 million/Mw and I wonder if the 99 Mw is real capacity or just imaginary capacity.

I don't think that a coal fired power plant costs nearly that much per Mw of capacity. Hell, I could go to the local hardware stores and buy up all of their gasoline generators and still produce power at a lower capital cost than wind power. It looks like we may be forced to do that if the watermelons continue to have influence out of proportion to their numbers. Something is very seriously wrong when people make idiotic decisions like this.

What is desperately needed is IQ tests for politicians as well as numeracy tests. My latest BC Hydro bill had a notice asking for suggestions on future power development in BC. I'll be recommending damming more rivers, coal power plants and building nuclear reactors. I'll also suggest that we let the military use the current bird blenders for artillery target practice.

*
oh, come on... you knuckle-draggin' neocon naysayers... this is new brunswick...
it's not like there's gonna be months of ice and cold and, uh... never mind.

*

Recall Canadian politicians Liberal Citoyen Kyoto Dionky & Liberal O'Harvard Iggy for their impeachment & adjustment.

"The BOM claim their adjustments are “neutral” yet Ken Stewart showed that the trend in the raw figures for our whole continent has been adjusted up by 40%."

...-

"Climate Audit requested of the Australian BoM and CSIRO

Climate map of Australia, based on Köppen clas...

Image via Wikipedia

On Jo Nova’s site, the cat is set amongst the pigeons:

A team of skeptical scientists, citizens, and an Australian Senator have lodged a formal request with the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) to have the BOM and CSIRO audited.

The BOM claim their adjustments are “neutral” yet Ken Stewart showed that the trend in the raw figures for our whole continent has been adjusted up by 40%. The stakes are high. Australians could have to pay something in the order of $870 million dollars thanks to the Kyoto protocol, and the first four years of the Emissions Trading Scheme was expected to cost Australian industry (and hence Australian shareholders and consumers) nearly $50 billion dollars.

Given the stakes, the Australian people deserve to know they are getting transparent, high quality data from the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM). The small cost of the audit is nothing in comparison with the money at stake for all Australians. We need the full explanations of why individual stations have been adjusted repeatedly and non-randomly, and why adjustments were made decades after the measurements were taken. We need an audit of surface stations. (Are Australian stations as badly manipulated and poorly sited as the US stations? Who knows?)

The NZ equivalent to the Australian BOM is under an official review

The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition found adjustments that were even more inexplicable (0.006 degrees was adjusted up to 0.9 degrees). They decided to push legally and the response was a litany of excuses — until finally The National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) was forced to disavow it’s own National Temperature Records, and belatedly pretend that it had never been intended for public consumption. But here’s the thing that bites: NZ signed the Kyoto protocol, arguably based very much on the NZ temperature record, and their nation owes somewhere from half a billion to several billion dollars worth of carbon credits (depending on the price of carbon in 2012). Hence there is quite a direct link from the damage caused by using one unsubstantiated data set based on a single student’s report that no one can find or replicate that will cost the nation a stack of money. NIWA is now potentially open to class actions. (Ironically, the Australian BOM has the job of “ratifying” the reviewed NZ temperature record.)

Thanks to work by Ken Stewart, Chris Gillham, Andrew Barnham, Tony Cox, James Doogue, David Stockwell, as well as Cory Bernardi, Federal Senator for South Australia.

Copied below is the cover note of our request."

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/02/15/climate-audit-requested-of-the-australian-bom-and-csiro/

over 30k a home for capital costs without including operating costs.

no wonder they all want subsidies for this ridiculous solution.

Same thing happened in Minnesota Feb 2010...
-----------------------
In Minnesota, the wind is blowing but turbines aren’t turning. The machines, bought used from California and installed last fall, are completely frozen in place.

http://venturebeat.com/2010/02/08/minnesotas-frozen-turbines-raise-new-doubts-about-wind-power/

Couldn't help noticing that the high execs and board of directors of Suez are comprised mostly of French and Belgian government/industry shuttle bureaucrats with one notable exception, a Canadian, named Paul Demarais Jr.

Well I am at home in Bathurst now and the wind is howling. Too bad the blades are not spinning. Surely there is a simple fix to this problem as one suggested, heated blades.

BTW, you global warming neanderthal deniers never cease to amaze me, I can hardly wait to see you all eat crow when you will have to admit within 5 years(I figure) that there is a problem caused by excessive greenhouse gases. The downsize is that your collective obstructionism delayed positive moves to stop the rise of greenhouse gases and will have contributed to the oncoming disasters. What a bunch of boneheads you all are.

New Brunswick meet the Polar Bear ( Green madness).
The greenish are carnivores. The Weather, a faithless mistress.

An Arctic explorer came face to face with a polar bear. Afraid of being eaten, he fell to his knees and started praying. When the polar bear knelt down beside him and started praying too, the man shouted, "It's a miracle!" The polar bear opened one eye and said "Don't talk while I'm saying grace."

Canuckguy - You forgot the /sarc off at the end.

Bang on, AtlanticJim. .Bang. .On.

I'm no fan of big subsidies, nor of poorly planned projects, but now that my tax dollars have been spent, I take no pleasure in seeing these projects fail so miserably.

Pharaoh Liberal Red-Green McGuinty speaks from his pharisaical throne.

...-

"Wind farm moratorium not election-based: McGuinty"

"The governing Liberals' surprise decisions to halt off-shore wind farms and freeze the minimum wage have nothing to do with a provincial election that's just eight months away, Premier Dalton McGuinty said Tuesday.

Anti-wind power protesters have greeted McGuinty in many communities across the province, but the premier insisted the moratorium on off-shore projects is not politically motivated.

"People are free to do as they wish in terms of drawing whatever inferences that they desire from the decisions of the government," he said after speaking to a business audience in Brampton, Ont.

"But the fact of the matter is, we've been very aggressive with respect to land-based wind turbines. We will continue to be very aggressive with respect to locating land-based wind turbines here in Ontario."

The government announced the sudden reversal on off-shore projects last Friday, just minutes after McGuinty had finished speaking to reporters."

"But there may be other hurdles ahead.

Last month, a three-judge panel from the Ontario Division Court began reviewing evidence and submissions from people challenging the government's 550-metre setback for wind turbines from homes.

An Environmental Review Tribunal has also been holding hearings in Chatham and Toronto on a proposal by Suncor for a wind farm in Thamesville, which some residents fear will disrupt their sleep and cause other health problems. Those hearings were set to resume in Chatham on Tuesday."

http://ottawa.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20110215/wind-farm-moratorium-110215/20110215/?hub=OttawaHome

Deja vu or what - it was just last winter that an IWT site was shut down for weeks near Bathurst N.B. due to icing - is this the same outfit?

Yes, this is the 2nd year running for their freeze up - this time Caribou's bird beaters have been shut down since the 2nd week of January.

From the article: "We can’t control the weather,” Julie Vitek said". I thought humans 'controlling' the weather was the reason these things are getting built in the first place? Curious.

Solid: not the weather; we control the climate, silly. Or so they tell us.

Canuckguy at February 15, 2011 8:06 PM

Wow, we stand in awe of your well reasoned, fact backed, and all overpowering logical argument.

Heat the blades, why did we not think of that! (maybe if you read the thread Einstein).

And you so brilliantly ignored the 2/3rds of the world that will not pay for your fraud, or pay homage to your idée fixe. But that's ok, right? Just because your boat has a gaping hole at port, does not mean you should not put extra effort in painting starboard, right?

How could we have been so wrong?

Maybe if we all moved to federal welfare dependent Butt-hurst, and genuflected at the same single Completely Biased Coverage propaganda channel that comes into your trailer on the old rabbit ears (and possibly had a taxpayer funded lobotomy) we might get close to your brainwashed ecotard perspective.

Not that there is anything wrong with that, every village needs its AGW fundamentalist simpleton.

Wind energy is better suited for backyard hobby projects. On another note, is the CBC closing commenting on any Climate Change related story they publish. Maybe others have noticed this also. The stories are heavy on pro Climate Change hyperbole. It seems to have started a couple of days ago. Can anyone else confirm this, and what recourse does one have to reverse this obvious biased policy.

In response to Eskimo:

They can't install electric heating systems in the fan blades because that would use up all the energy these useless pieces of junk generate. Maybe they thought of the freezing problem but figured the people they hire to chip the ice would allow the politicians to brag about all the green jobs that are being created. This whole greenie thing is one big sick joke!

loki, good suggestion @ 6:36 about artillery practice targets. Although a 4" mortar set at the right angle might loosen up the shafts.

Sgt. Lajaune @ 7:31, interesting! Isn't Paul Demarais Jr. related to a certain Canadian politician who signed Koyto? Thought so. Conflict of interest?

Canuckguy

I'm thinking this frozen turbine blade problem is an easy fix.

Shale gas. Simply punch a shale gas well at every wind turbine site, frac the crap out of it and plumb the ensuing gas into the turbine.

I'm sure some kind of burner array could be easily affixed to the leading edge of each blade. For a prototype I envision bar-b-que burners and duct tape but of course the technology will evolve if enough government investments are made in green energy.

Right?

If only there were a way to conduct the aggregate environmental GFNGO seatwarmers' heat, thawing these blades would be no problem.

Sgt. Lajaune @ 7:31

A link would be nice. My searches are obviously lacking.

Maybe we should put solar panels on the wind farms to power electric heaters for the wind turbines.

NorthernOnt:

Just checked CBC.ca on the main Ont. story of last Fri. There are 355 comments and the thread is still open. As you might suspect, the opinions are about the mirror image of the ones being posted here. I did point out some basic facts, but
there was little toleration for facts. As they say their minds are made up Wind=Good
Coal/Gas=Bad. Go ahead and make a comment, I did not run into any problems with editing.

Mr. Potatohead (3:41 PM) said "It's not the fault of Suzuki, Gore et al. The blame lies squarely on the shoulders of the politicians. ...".

Yeah, and Bernie Madoff was just having a little bit of fun!

Give your head a shake. This is as criminal as it gets!!

Phantom, the surface area is enormous, so heating is out of the question. As for de-icing fluid, not really possible given that they are in essentially constant motion.

There is no de-icing of the Horn's Reef windmills to my knowledge. That's why ice-throwing can be a problem. They also don't usually get winters cold enough for the salt water to freeze. Gotta love that Gulf Stream, compared to the Labrador Current which hits Atlantic Canada right in the chops.

Cascadian, all that a wind mill does is produce mechanical energy by turning a shaft. This is fine if all you want is mechanical energy to run a very old style water pump. But if you want electricity, you have to do a lot more. It's back to Faraday's Laws and Maxwell's equations of electromagnetic induction.

So you have to have a generator and converter to turn that into electricity. You can only convert it through magnetic fields, so you have to have enough electricity coming into the generator and converter to raise a magnetic field and charge the converter. Otherwise, the turbine just spins and doesn't do anything. The gearbox also needs electricity to run. So if you have a shut down turbine, you need to run the gearbox to get the turbine out of a locked position.

It's very similar to your car. The motor won't turn over by itself. You need a charge into the starter motor to turn the engine over mechanically. Running the starter motor means you need a stored source of electricity, the battery. In the case of turbines, they draw their startup current from the grid they will be supplying. In the case of the wind turbine, you don't need energy to turn the blades; I'm presuming the wind does that. But you need outside supply of electricity to start up all of its electrical equipment.

I don't know how much electricity that is or what the inrush is. However, the manufacturers such as GE or Vesta know it very well, as well as the ongoing operating load.

Nuclear power plants also can't black start themselves. Simply pulling out the control rods in a reactor doesn't start any generation because there's nothing at that point to turn over the main circulation pumps (they are about 200,000 HP synchronous electric motors, at least they are on that scale). And each reactor has four of them. So the nuclear plant has to draw power from the grid to which it is connected to provide the excitation and inrush current for the circulation pump motors (lots of other things too, but those are the main load). The backup diesel generators at a nuclear station are not to allow the reactor to start up. They are there to power all the control systems and ensure that the plant's shutdown systems are all fully powered. The typical requirement in a nuclear plant is about 100% redundancy for diesel generators. Most plants have four of them, and one can fill the minimum requirement, I believe, though it might be two.

Once the plant is running, there's a huge surplus of power. But typical for any thermal plant, internal consumption is about 5% of total output.

So when Ontario had its great electricity blackout in 2003, the only plants that managed to stay operating were the hydro damns, the coal stations, the few gas plants and the four nuclear reactors that managed to go into standby mode before grid rejection occurred. All the remaining nuclear plants could only start up after the grid had been restored.

In Ontario's case, it had to largely restart its system on its own and it took nearly two days for the grid to come back up. (Which took a truly ferocious amount of work by the generators and Hydro One in particular.) In the case of New York, Ohio and Michigan, they could restart quite quickly because they were all surrounded by electrical systems which were not blacked out.

Simple solution to the icing on the blades, get canuckguy to lick them clean.

(No sarcasm intended.)

"Simple solution to the icing on the blades, get canuckguy to lick them clean."

Stop it. It's far too late tonight to be rolling on the floor laughing hysterically. Now I just have to mop up all this coffee. And clean the screen, and...

POWinCA - now that made me laugh. What a green solution that is. It is surprising a greeny didn't come up with that solution. Twits/morons/idiots.

Out of curiosity I thought I'd look at BC hydro's web site and it was not what I needed to see at this time of night. I'm sure I've got some drugs around here to calm me down as right now I feel the urge to go out watermelon hunting. Check out:
http://www.bchydro.com/news/articles/press_releases/2010/new_act_powers_bc_forward.html

I had no idea there was such a thing as a BC "clean energy act" which is essentially designed to cripple the BC economy. Maybe the BC communist party replaced Campbell's brain with one from a Suzuki clone as right now I can't see any difference between the BC lieberals and the commies. Maybe there's too many bald eagles in BC and it's impacting on the Native Indian salmon fishery and bird blenders are a way of decreasing eagle numbers.

BC Hydro wants to hear from the people of BC about its plans and it's time to let them know at:
integrated.resource.planning@bchydro.com
You can find out more about the proposed lunacy at http://bchydro.com/IRP
At least they consider hydroelectric power clean energy but their plans are to reduce power consumption. That means massive increases in rates as BC Hydro's costs certainly aren't going down. I guess one of the things I can do to dissipate some of the rage is start planning now for what I can do for the next human achievement hour. A good opportunity to give my house electrical system a test -- I've got 200 amps coming in and will see if I can use 190 Kwh during human achievement hour. Just wish I had some of my old power hungry PDP-11's which my wife made me give away (at least they went to a good home).

"We can't control the weather."

"...some kind of burner array could be easily affixed to the leading edge of each blade" Wouldn't work, the wind would blow out the burners. ;-)

Anyone who has run aircraft in the far north knows how important keeping the head in the mechanics is.

Bathurst has plenty of timber around. Why not build a bonfire at the base of every windmill?

This is a story by greg weston that dearly needs to be looked into by someone with a science back ground.Check out statements by david coon the genius? behind nb power.Here is a long link to the story.
dailygleaner.com - Breaking News, New Brunswick, CanadaCOMMUNICATIONS N.B.. Just a day after coming agonizingly close to a Canada ...
dailygleaner.canadaeast.com

cgh, I hadn't considered surface area to be heated in my thinking. Usually with aircraft they heat the leading edge and the rest pretty much cracks off in the breeze, but with an 80 ft blade that could lead to some healthy weight imbalances as ice comes off unevenly. Leave one blade out of three loaded for a couple of turns and you'd probably hear a big kaboom from the main bearing.

Just goes to show how very not ready for prime time this tech is, and gee whiz they freakin' went and installed it anyway, billions of dollars worth.

Tax cut now. Power must be taken from the hands of these dangerous children.

It kind of makes you wonder. For those of you who believe in God, if this is His way of telling us we're going down the wrong track with respect to green energy.

Why can't they just switch over to solar? Oh wait. The solar farms are buried in snow

Now that they're not turning, maybe they could be put to another, better use, like crucifixes. Hmmmmm......

And another one escapes the group think mob:

A heretic in Al Gore’s backyard.

ORNL Scientist Tells The Truth About Global Warming

http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2011/02/15/ornl-scientist-tells-the-truth-about-global-warming/

Phantom: "a big kaboom..."

No bloody kidding.
Ontario Hydro did a large series of safety tests on wind turbines in the 1970s. These were just little 150 kW machines, not the 1-3 MW jobs we have today, so their blade length was trivial compared to the modern monsters.

OH found that the MEDIAN (not average) throw distance on blade separation from the hub was nearly 500 metres. At a weight of about 500 kg, one of them would go through a house roof. In short, we knew all the limitations of wind turbines more than 30 years ago. The key factors were speed of rotation and trajectory on separation.

Now we're dealing with machines with blades 10 times that mass. They won't go through the roof, they'll go through to the sub basement and take everything with it.

Also, no one cares about ice flaking off wings at 30,000 feet. It sublimates or melts long before it hits the ground. But ice flung off a wind turbine blade is going to hit something.

Madasl, I looked at the Weston article. All that Coon said in essence was that he didn't know anything. (Gee, what a surprise coming from that eco-twit.)

Favill: God is unnecessary in this case. Physics and engineering long ago determined that these things had severe limits. What it shows is the extent to which the greens wanted to come up with an alternative to nuclear, because that's most of what it's always been about until the AGW scam came along. Then they also became the preferred alternative to all fossil fuels as well.

Good think they didn't set up a couple as a test first. Could have queered the whole deal!

Anyone else notice this quote from the article:

“For us, cold and dry weather is good and that’s what’s typical in the region. Cold and wet weather can be a problem without any warmer days to prompt thawing, which has been the case this year.

Umm. The winter I spent in New Brunswick was awfully damp compared to a good prairie winter...