The Answer, My Friend

Little Known Facts 104 Comments

Engineers were working over the weekend to investigate the collapse of a wind turbine which led to three Scottish wind farms being shut.
The 200ft turbine at the Beinn an Tuirc wind farm in Argyll and Bute “bent in half” during heavy winds last week.
ScottishPower, which owns the 26-turbine facility, has closed it while representatives of the company that manufacture Vestas V47 machines investigate the fault.
Dunlaw wind farm, a 26-turbine base near Lauder in the Borders, and the 20-turbine Hare Hill facility, close to New Cumnock, Ayrshire, were also shut down as a precautionary measure.
A spokesman for ScottishPower said it was believed to be the first time a turbine had collapsed in the UK. He said engineers would be trying to find out whether the faulty turbine was in operation at the time of its collapse on Thursday.
Wolf-gerrit Fruh, a senior lecturer in energy engineering at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, described the incident as “extremely unusual”.
Shetland Aerogenerators, which operates three Vestas V47s at Burradale wind farm, near Lerwick, Shetland, has also been told of the problems.

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(at left) – Oregon collapse in 25 mph wind kills worker.
More: Wind Power’s other unreliability problem
SDA Flashback – Sask Power wind power construction project in Swift Current area destroyed by tornado.

104 Replies to “The Answer, My Friend”

  2. Not surprising at all.
    This recent clean technology is on a shakedown voyage to higher reliability.
    Just as new ships are in shakedown mode for the first year or two before the bugs are ironed out.
    To be expected. = TG

  3. Wind power, while being inovative and great for grinding flour should not be looked at as the great answer. Sometimes the wind doesn’t blow and it seems that in Saskatchewan, it sucks. (Me bad, I know but it ties in the tornado link).
    Being a mechanical device it can and does fail. That is not unknown and to be expected but making it sound like they have to ground the fleet is more MSM sensationalizing than anything else.
    Like everything else there are also downsides to wind power like wacking daydreaming birds and actually being quite noisy. You don’t have to be that close to hear them.

  5. Quality and accelerated life testing on any popular “green technology” is fairly scarce.
    Green tech is deemed to automatically be a superior..unfortunately green tech contractors on goverment vendor lists shave quality as much as anyone.

  6. This proves the old saying that there are no perfect solutions. Wind energy is only produced when wind of sufficient strength is blowing, and they can only provide supplementary energy at best. In addition, they are structures and mechanical devices and can fail as shown above.

  7. I believe that wind power makes sense for smaller rural individual installations (when used in combination with other green technologies such as solar and geothermal). It certainly doesn’t hurt to have a turbine charging up your battery bank on a blustery day.
    It’s easy enough for one family to keep an eye on the power meter and run extra loads of laundry when the wind is high, but the wind just isn’t reliable enough to run a power grid off of.

  9. the costs of battery banks on anything is prohibitive. as is the cost of the inverters to convert it to a useful 3 phase cycle.

  10. actually one of the coolest things about windpower is that the largest wind “resource” lies in dirty old Alberta again. more izzy money .

  13. “the costs of battery banks on anything is prohibitive”
    I’d rather buy batteries made in North America than jihadi oil, thanks. The latter will be more expensive than anyone realizes.

  14. I used to drive past the mega bird grinders in Minnesota on the way to Sioux Falls SD. I have a picture of them here, in the photo the blades are about four times longer than my pickup truck.
    They feather them when the wind gets strong, because otherwise the tips will start breaking the sound barrier and the shock will shatter the blades. My picture here was taken at ~ 1/30th of a second exposure on a not particularly windy day, you can see the tips blur a bit.
    Always wondered what would happen if one of those blades came off. Now I know.

  15. haha..oh jesus..now Kate takes on wind power probably for no other reason than that she sees it as a construct of left leaning people and God knows that everything is completely black and white and anything that can be associated with the left should be vilified and hated even if the issue (ie. this one) doesn’t need to be politicized because both capitalists and the evil greenies win. Because its not real electricity unless it comes from a non renewable resource. To do anything else would be to give in to the leftist greenies even if it meant making a boatload of cash. 😛
    I now expect Kate to report from here on all the deaths and injuries from the extraction and processing of coal.
    Thanks, I look forward to it.

  16. Ya gotta admire Kate. Just the fact that she posts an interesting article is enough to get leftie steve all in a tither. And I’m sure that some one will correct or clairify but these was more that a couple of threads on coal mine accidents of late.
    btw, Sean, I prefer Texas Tea or Athabasca Sand to jihadi oil any day. It was PET who bought ME oil for more than he was willing to pay Alberta back in the NEP days.

  18. I don’t get it–so a few failures and you want to write the whole thing off? What a bunch of fringe rightwing wackos on this site. Freaks, hiding from society and using attacks on progressive causes as a pretext to cover their alienation. I can’t imagine how incarcerating the prison of your mind you’ve constructed for yourself is.

  19. Nuclear reactors melt down, oil tankers spill their cargo, hydro turbines burn out etc etc.
    You have nothing to say except ” new things scare me.”

  20. Fellow Winston,
    How exactly is windpower a ‘progressive cause’?
    There is hardly anything progressive or new about harnessing the wind for power.

  21. You have to admit, wind power is still incredibly cool. Likewise solar. The thought of throwing a solar panel over a tree branch on a Northern island to power my LCD TV and satellite dish while I fish on the shores …..
    But reliability isn’t a problem with the technology. It could be a problem with cheapskate companies with employees who specialise in risk management.
    My old computer here still crashes and burns at every turn, but the technology is good enough to power everything in the military.

  22. Ya, just one failure —- wind power itself !!
    [Denmark (population 5.3 million) has over 6,000 turbines that produced electricity equal to 19% of what the country used in 2002. Yet no conventional power plant has been shut down. Because of the intermittency and variability of the wind, conventional power plants must be kept running at full capacity to meet the actual demand for electricity. Most cannot simply be turned on and off as the wind dies and rises, and the quick ramping up and down of those that can be would actually increase their output of pollution and carbon dioxide (the primary “greenhouse” gas). So when the wind is blowing just right for the turbines, the power they generate is usually a surplus and sold to other countries at an extremely discounted price, or the turbines are simply shut off.] Eric Rosenbloom
    http://www.aweo.org/ProblemWithWind.html

  23. Wind and Solar Power works really, really well —- in Popular Mechanics 🙂
    So did Super Milage carburators.

  25. [Denmark is just dependent enough on wind power that when the wind is not blowing right they must import electricity. In 2000 they imported more electricity than they exported. And added to the Danish electric bill are the subsidies that support the private companies building the wind towers. Danish electricity costs for the consumer are the highest in Europe.] Eric Rosenbloom

  26. That link Kate put up says that one problem these had was “gear boxes that fail in less than 5 years.”
    OK, not fair.
    My hard drive has a 5 year warranty. Bearings fail.
    Would you like to take a guess how long it takes before the engine of a commercial jet is rebuilt?
    Things fail. If these companies are too stupid to perform preventative maintenance then that is their fault.
    Glad they don’t run an airline! Wait until the airplane falls out of the sky because it is cheaper to write it off.

  28. [Throughout Europe, wind turbines produced on average less than 20% of their theoretical (or rated) capacity.] Eric Rosenbloom

  29. [In high winds, ironically, the turbines must be stopped because they are easily damaged. Build-up of dead bugs has been shown to halve the maximum power generated by a wind turbine, reducing the average power generated by 25% and more. Build-up of salt on off-shore turbine blades similarly has been shown to reduce the power generated by 20%-30%.] ER

  30. “I don’t get it–so a few failures and you want to write the whole thing off? What a bunch of fringe rightwing wackos on this site.”
    – fellow moonbat
    After billions spent, the massive German wind farms are considered a failure. You see, in order for these wind farms to be considered even slightly efficient they have to be running at 30%. The German installations have never run above 18%.
    But I reckon you’ll have to be excused. Afterall you’re a leftard. So therefore, with the recognized mental deficiency that marks your illness, you obviously aren’t able to comprehend things like that.
    Some advice. You probably shouldn’t spend too much time on this blog. It’ll only confuse you further.

  31. [Eon Netz, the grid manager for about a third of Germany, discusses the technical problems of connecting large numbers of wind turbines [click here]: Electricity generation from wind fluctuates greatly, requiring additional reserves of “conventional” capacity to compensate; high-demand periods of cold and heat correspond to periods of low wind; only limited forecasting is possible for wind power; wind power needs a corresponding expansion of the high-voltage and extra-high-voltage grid infrastructure; and expansion of wind power makes the grid more unstable.] Eric Rosenbloom

  32. [Issues of icing, noise, and structural damage and failure, particularly as they determine setback requirements, have been extensively documented by John Mollica in response to the proposed expansion of a wind facility on Wachusetts Mountain in Massachusetts (between Princeton and Fitchburg).]

  33. “Freaks, hiding from society and using attacks on progressive causes as a pretext to cover their alienation”
    An amazing concidence. I have that on a tee shirt. It’s a really long, oversized tee shirt.

  34. “Ya gotta admire Kate. Just the fact that she posts an interesting article is enough to get leftie steve all in a tither.”
    Not in a “tither” at all. I’m more so in awe that Kate has taken issue with wind power of all things. Even more hilarious is that she doesn’t attack it’s viability as an alternative, but rather it’s safety record. As others in the comments have aptly pointed out, there are technological challenges and dangers in all forms of the production process. Next time a hurricane puts a bunch of off shore oil platforms off line, I expect a post about it.
    Her post would make sense if wind power had a starkly worse safety and technical record than more traditional methods of energy production, but I’m guessing it doesn’t. In fact, I’d bet money that there are a greater degree of problems proportionally in most other energy generation processes(ie. coal extraction)
    Like I’ve said before, Kate makes a good point on occasion, but if she’s going to have a “Best of SDA”, she may want to consider having a “worst of SDA” where she can lump in poorly thought out arguments such as this one.
    I’m not for a minute suggesting that wind power is a solution or total alternative in the grand scheme of things, but cripes, if there’s anything that should demonstrate to right leaning people the validity of such a technology, it should be the barrage of wind farms in North America that have been started by private enterprise that go on to make a buck. I’m not sure why anyone would suggest we can only have one alternative. From my eyes wind power works in some places but not others, but where it does work, its an a-politcal issue. Capitalists win as do greens. That’s why I’m baffled that Kate takes issue with it. I guess it’s not a win if it makes everyone happy. Someone has to lose in her world.

  35. heres another good bit from calgary, the LRT here is supposed to ride the wind, so the city has signed up for more expensive wind power, realisticly of course all the electrons are just pulled from the grid and nothing other than money really moves. better yet though, when they bought new LRT cars a few years ago ,they bought AC cars not DC as were already existing , so they had to install big inverters on the tops of the new ones, you can tell because it looks like they were built in my garage instead of in germany. so the AC grid is converted to DC in the lines and back to AC again for the wheels. another 10% loss of efficiency.

  36. Its the REVENGE OF THE BIRDS too many of their brothers and sisters have been killed by those things so they just jumped up and down on it till it fell over SQUAWK SQUAWK

  37. [Despite their being cited as the shining example of what can be accomplished with wind power, the Danish government has cancelled plans for three offshore wind farms planned for 2008 and has scheduled the withdrawal of subsidies from existing sites. Development of onshore wind plants in Denmark has effectively stopped. Because Danish companies dominate the wind industry, however, the government is under pressure to continue their support. Spain began withdrawing subsidies in 2002. Germany reduced the tax breaks to wind power, and domestic construction drastically slowed in 2004. Switzerland also is cutting subsidies as too expensive for the lack of significant benefit. The Netherlands decommissioned 90 turbines in 2004. Many Japanese utilities severely limit the amount of wind-generated power they buy, because of the instability they cause. For the same reason, Ireland in December 2003 halted all new wind-power connections to the national grid. In early 2005, they were considering ending state support. In 2005, Spanish utilities began refusing new wind power connections. In 2006, the Spanish government ended — by emergency decree — its subsidies and price supports for big wind. In 2004, Australia reduced the level of renewable energy that utilities are required to buy, dramatically slowing wind-project applications. On August 31, 2004, Bloomberg News reported that “the unstable flow of wind power in their networks” has forced German utilities to buy more expensive energy, requiring them to raise prices for the consumer.] Eric Rosenbloom
    http://www.aweo.org/ProblemWithWind.html
    Needless to say, activity at de smog blog has probably just spiked —- trying to figure out a way to smear Eric Rosenbloom.
    Same thing happened to Patrick Moore, Tim Ball, Bjorn Lomborg, Steven MvIntyre and countless others.
    The only tactic that works when cornered 🙂

  38. They should have a political “WIND FARM” set up around Ottawa.
    Efficiency should be in the neighborhood of 125%!!
    Imagine all the power to be generated by the Mulroney Schreiber inquiry.
    The mean time between failure (MTBF) for this wind farm should be of the order of several billion years.
    Cheers

  39. Once upon a time I drove through the desert near Palm Springs California, home of the windiest place in North America. Its a desert valley where the breezes blow virtually without cease. They have the mother of all wind farms there, its been there a loooong time. Like, since the Seventies, man.
    The desert is the most perfect environment available for wind machinery. No bugs, no birds, no vegetation, no corrosion from rain or salt spray, just steady wind and sunshine.
    I’m pretty sure that wind farm has yet to break even. But I could be wrong. If I am wrong, I bet y’all a donut the return on investment is less than leaving the money in a savings account.
    I know for a fact that the 100 mile long wind farm in Minnesota is a black hole for public money. Kinda like the gun registry but more expensive and less useful.
    Reality tends not to conform itself to the wishes of wild eyed environmentalists. Bummer, dudes.

  40. Surely no one is saying that the wind turbine projects are a waste of time or money!!
    The projects are very well planned long before any systems are bought or towers built. This planning includes wind audits that are more than sufficient to build engineering models for any configuration of machines in any location.
    Frankly the bleatings of some power company execs bemoaning the problems they have to deal with do not impress. As one of the biggest opponents to windgen adoption are the established power utility groups.
    This is because wind farms can be built by relatively small groups or communities that subsequently achieve a measure of independence from those utilities.
    As someone who has been actively involved in several initiatives for windgen studies and projects along with a a number of other alternative energy technologies …. I can tell you with a high degree of certainty that the investment pays. I’ll go one step further and opine that based on my experience the single biggest threat and obstacle to these projects are government bureaucrats and regulators trying to justify their existence combined with ignorant members of the public casting about ridiculous theories of risk.
    If anyone is going to try to make the case that a few tower collapses or turbine failures have any impact on the long term viability of wind gen they are full of crap…. might as well try to argue that because power lines go down or transmission towers collapse or controls occasionally fail that the distribution system is a waste.
    A logical failure that would parallel the hysterics over Three Mile Island or even Chernobyl on the nuclear power generation front.
    Comes from a mindset that seems very similar to the Classic Luddite. Chicken little said …. “bwaaaak!”
    Absolute hogwash!

  41. wind farms tend to beat the pi$$ out of bats as well. no one know why they seem to be attracted to these structures because the insect population tends to be low at the blade area.

  42. The sand that is blowing in the Palm Springs wind, erodes the propeller blades at a horrendous rate. The Sand Blaster alters the blades critical profile and —- junk.

  43. Wind power is fine on a small scale in remote areas but it is increasingly obvious that it doesn’t scale well and the environmental impact is huge. Environmentalists go into hysterics when a handfull of ducks are covered in oil but seem unperturbed over the hundreds to thousands more birds that are macerated by wind turbines.
    The money would be far better spent on higher energy density clean sources of energy such as fusion power. Robert Bussard, the originator of the Bussard Ramjet concept, has been quietly working on a device based on the fusor (http://fusor.net which is already capable of producing D-D fusion), and has already demonstrated that he can produce signficant amounts of fusion in a small device which, when scaled up, should be capable of producing practical fusion power. http://www.rexresearch.com/bussard/bussard.htm
    All he needs is $200-500 million to build a prototype; chicken feed in the multi-trillion dollar worldwide energy economy.
    Fusion power is clean, non-polluting and anthropogenic global warming fanatics were should be tossing money at Dr. Bussard to finish devloping his device (the fusion results I speak of were produced in November 2005). Yet, Al Gore says nothing about fusion power and I suspect he probably is totally clueless about it and I’m sure Dr. Fruitfly would be totally opposed to it as his hidden agenda is to put people back into a romanticized stone-age mode of existence.
    There’s an excellent article about fusors in the Jan/Feb 2008 Analog. “The world’s simplest fusion reactor revisited” by Tom Ligon who spent 4.5 years working on the project with Dr. Bussard. It was probably the most exciting news I’ve heard in some years as I’ve been waiting for fusion power to happen for almost 40 years now. Unfortunately tokamak’s are a dead end, but this seems to be where all the fusion research money is going. To demonstrate fusion in your own home, you can build a fusor which just produces neutrons when filled with deuterium gas and operated at the right voltage (certainly not a source of energy), but something that can be built by a high school student and which was first described in 1920! Interesting how science can get totally sidetracked sometimes.

  44. If you don’t mind paying 10 cents/KWH and if you can tie them into a grid with preferably hydro power to compensate for the average 26% capacity factor and if you have enduring winds between 12 and 40 kmh (operating range) within an economical distance of a transmission grid and if your greenies will allow you to chop up a few birds now and again and if your NIMBYs aren’t close enough to complain about the landscape alteration and your regulators only make you jump through afforable EAs, no problem – go wind power!

  45. OMMAG: I was about to give Kate a blast for taking a political shot at a purely technical problem about which she knows nothing but, a response to your babbling takes prescedence.
    “wind farms can be built by relatively small groups or communities that subsequently achieve a measure of independence from those utilities”
    – as long as they remain hooked to the grid so that power is available when needed.
    “I can tell you with a high degree of certainty that the investment pays”
    – provided that it receives a comfortable level of subsidy.
    “biggest threat and obstacle to these projects are government bureaucrats and regulators”
    – who have a duty to protect the integrity of the power grid for the public good.

  46. Yes, all generation systems have their faults and break downs.
    The point here, is that WP generation is horrendously expensive (3X, 4X or more than conventional) and is not feasible, even with huge taxpayer subsidies.
    So, the WP scam allows Gore Inc. to take excess money out of our electric bill pocket in order to reduce CO2 emmissions by an infinitessible small amount (compared to the Earth’s natural systems) which would have a negligible effect on greenhose warming anyways and even that, if it occured, would be beneficial, if one could detect it, because Canada is such a frggin cold country in the first place.
    I think Kate was just pointing out that we are going to a lot of trouble for no gain, all pain.

  48. I have to agree with steve on this one: this is a bad post, which boils down to not much more than, “Ha ha, some wind turbines fall, others break, so wind power sucks!”
    A malfunctioning alarm system and poor maintenance of tree growth around power lines led to the 2003 blackout. So do conventional power generation systems and their controls suck more because of that catastrophic failure?

  49. How does one get a job as a wind auditor? Is it related to a fresh air inspector?
    The main point is let the market decide on wind power without the subsidies.

  50. As far as I’m concerned I’d rather invest in electricity power from nuclear or coal fired generators, instead of some politically correct trendy “progressive” pet project the government has to sweeten in the first place, for “private” investment even to occur.
    Sean hit the nail on the head, private wind power is the way to go, a farmer near here put up a large wind turbine (used from Holland), and I’m fairly sure when it comes to being private it meets the meaning of the word fairly square on. Much more squarely than the wind farm being constructed just down the road from where I live.
    It’s bad enough you can’t take a landscape picture here without a cell phone tower in it, now it’s huge groups of even worse “eye sores”, someone like McGuinty endorses – which should speak volumes.
    I don’t know maybe its just me but seeing groups of these things popping up like the plague, just doesn’t make me all warm and fuzzy inside.
    Just like the two co- gen stations (pet projects)being built near Sarnia that are soon going to be sucking up the same commodity I heat my home with, and which have been stated by the liberal government as only being operated when they are needed- which is code for all the time.
    Oh and the biggest solar farm in North America (McGuinty endorsed)that’s a whole other story, we had some of the most beautiful cloudy days this year lots of them, and it is going to be built right under them, and they already signed a twenty year contract at 42 cents a kilowatt.We pay six at the meter?
    “Brilliant”, warm and fuzzy.
    Guess you have to be “progressive” to be hood winked.

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