Keeping track of alternative failures is like drinking from a firehose;
A $2.5-million wind turbine at the Dorchester Penitentiary has stopped working and the Correctional Service of Canada cannot estimate when it will be generating electricity again.
The federal government purchased two wind turbines for Canadian penitentiaries in the last five years but both units have caused problems.
A 600-kW/h wind turbine was installed at the Dorchester Penitentiary in 2009, making it the first federal institution to generate a portion of its electricity from wind.
However, nearby residents say the wind turbine at Dorchester hasn’t been working in months.
h/t Dan T
This article makes me wonder if the bird blender in Toronto is still broken. Anyone know?
Perhaps the windmill at Dorchester could be repurposed as a gibbet?
Bird blenders are ugly, they humm at a high pitch and drive sensitive ears (dogs, some people, horses, cats…) crazy (produce headaches and stress), they take up valuable pasture space, and they kill birds, bees, and bats in a ghastly brutal way. They cost taxpayers billions to build (they are all subsidized because no sane private company or person would purchase such a stupid thing) and they rarely function.
Why are these grotesque structures being built or maintained?
Mr. Harper, tear down those bird grinders!
What Sean and Jema54 said.
And the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on the middle class/poor moves along. Notice two points…(1)They never tell you the ACTUAL output,just the rated.They actually only produce 20% tops of rated.
(2) They never tell you the actual cost to build the suckers,what with concrete,rare earth minerals,transport,land loss,etc.
In reality,that 2.5 million for Dorchester is probably 5 million.Just think.In 500 years,they will have the money back! Yay.
Why not put the inmates on power-generating stationary bikes?
Look, don’t worry about the down-time.
Ontario voters are smart. They know that you can compensate for any extended periods of downtime simply by raising the price per kwh for electricity generated by fans.
Dildo McDinky told them so.
Two horns and the tail for that one. plus 10 points for style.
Toronto’s blender works on a regular basis – i.e. rotates – but it also has regular down time. I have no idea what it produces
MM
This is further proof (as though more were necessary) than green zealots are impervious to arithmetic.
There are 24 x 365 = 8760 hours in a year. At a (very generous) capacity factor of 25% (22% is standard for wind turbines), that means 2190 annual operating hours for this device, which at MAXIMUM output means 600 x 2190 = 1,314 MWh.
The current buy rate for electricity generated in Ontario is $0.063 per kWh. So every year this turbine would be expected to generate 1,314,000 x $0.063 = $82,782 worth of electricity.
If the turbine cost $2.5M to install, it will take 30.2 years to recoup its installation cost. Assuming, that is, that the installation wasn’t amortized over time, in which case it will take a hell of a lot longer.
The PLANNED lifespan of one of those turbines is a good deal less than 20 years (the generators themselves are warranteed for only 2), which means that when this thing was installed, those responsible should have known that it was statistically guaranteed to fail before it could pay for itself. The fact that it failed in less than 4 years just rubs salt in the wounds.
Now, multiply this one instance by the thousands of turbines that Dalton planned to scatter across the Ontario landscape…
And out of that supposed $82,782 that it’s supposed to generate, how much would need to be subtracted to cover maintenance costs on this POS?
So now they tell us these things don’t last nearly as along as promised by the Get Rich Quick Scammers promoting them in the first place.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2254901/Wind-turbines-half-long-previously-thought-study-shows-signs-wearing-just-12-years.html
Or in some cases, like the turbine atop Grouse Mountain and visible from all over the Vancouver area, it has never turned, never generated power . . . well except for photo ops and news stories.
“The current buy rate for electricity generated in Ontario is $0.063 per kWh…If the turbine cost $2.5M to install, it will take 30.2 years to recoup its installation cost…”
Donald, Donald, Donald. You are being disingenuous by not telling the complete story.
You see, at first glance it might look like a revenue shortfall, but it really is not. You get around it by simply by raising the rate paid for this green energy ten-fold. It’s brilliant!
Whadaya mean its the biggest scam ever pulled off by a government? Course it’s not a scam…the facts were all out there and people voted for it.
“A 600-kW/h wind turbine was installed at the Dorchester Penitentiary in 2009, making it the first federal institution to generate a portion of its electricity from wind.”
The metric system does not contain a unit denoted as “kW/h”. If one were to parse that out, it would read “kilowatts per hour”. “Watt”, which is in the metric system, is already a rate; it is defined as energy transfer at the rate of 1 Joule per second. A rate of change in a rate is an acceleration.
Now there is a unit called the kiloWatt-hour; that’s what your electric bill is probably quoted in. But it is equal to your consumption rate in kiloWatts, multiplied by the duration of time that the rate obtained. Obvious analogy: the speedometer of your car. If the pointer reads 100 km/h, and if you maintain that rate for an hour, you will indeed travel 100 km. If you maintain it for only 45 minutes, the odometer, which essentially integrates that rate with respect to time, will show you have traveled 75 km.
Anyway, it’s beside the point. kW/h is essentially a non-unit, and kWh is the wrong choice of unit to designate the capacity of a wind turbine, or any other kind of dynamo. Wind turbines are rated in kiloWatts, period, or megaWatts, if they are big enough. Which is their maximum rated output under ideal wind conditions. As has already been stated, their actual output, averaged over time, is a small fraction of that.
But, heh, it’s the CBC. Expecting any kind of technical competency from their reporters and editors is like expecting a pig to sing.
I oppose (subsidized) wind power, but contra Jema I’ve never seen one on pasture land, at least not particularly useful pasture.
(Though admittedly around here in Oregon and down south in California where I’ve seen them they tend to be on marginal but high-wind land, or in outright desert.)
This goes double for one at a penitentiary.
(They’re terrible ideas for various reasons, but that ain’t really one of ’em.)
Jamie, the only A-Holes that voted for them live in Toronto where they aren’t exposed to the esthetic and health problems they create. I invite all Torontarians to visit God’s Country (rural Southwestern Ontario) and witness what McGuinty hath wrought. These behemoths
are an abomination to both man and nature and serve no useful purpose than to piss off the
good, decent people that live there.
I can envision in the not so distant future that some incident will occur that will take down several of these at once. Purely by accident mind you.
Most of the failures are usually due to the equipment that is required to regulate voltage and wind spped. The basic unit itself is rather simple. My father was a telephone lineman. On weekends, he often subsidised his income by working on Jabobs (and other) 32 Volt DC units that once dotted the prairies. The same problem was prevalent back then. The speed govornors and voltage regulation were usually the problems. Most farmers had a gasoline engine for back up on the “no wind” situation. Eventually, most peple gave up on the generators and used the gas motors. With gas at 15 cents per imperial gallon, who needed wind.
I recentlky spoke to a Sask Power tech. He says the same problem occurs today, and the coal fired plants at Coronach and Estevan are the back ups.
I have a question. Why was the hydro needed to keep unrepentant thieves and rapists and murderers warm as toast all winter a responsibility of taxpayers that needed economizing in the first place?
The convicts are the only ones responsible for the fact they’re sitting in jail. They should be the only ones responsible for paying for their heat and light, or convincing friends and relatives to pay for it on their behalf.
“Let the blackguards freeze to death in the dark” were never more appropriate. If their mammies want them to stay warm at night, let them bring their babies a blanket.
Gord,
You’re completely correct. In the Superbowl lights thread, I trashed another instance of innumeracy
regarding electricity.
It’s not that difficult. I mean, would these idiots write “This car gets 20 mph per gallon”? Even a CBC reporter would realize how stupid that sounds. But move into the electric world, and no one recognizes the different between rate of production/use, total use, and average use. As I said in the other thread, no wonder their industry is dying.
But if one were to load Porkahontas into a trebuchet and launch her at the blender, would one not have true value from same? Follow on with David Suzuki, the entire staff of CBC, and…
And both trebuchets and those giant blenders are “green”. How much more appropriate could one want?
Might they not actually mean it takes a gallon of fuel to accelerate said “vehicle” to 20 mph? With the “performance” of some “green” vehicles, that does seem about right…
Regarding the Toronto windmill, I distinctly remember when it was first put in that it was for decoration only. It was not to be hooked into the grid at all. I don’t know if that ever changed. In any case it’s location, and relatively short stature makes it even more useless as a potential generator of power.
“…the only A-Holes that voted for them live in Toronto…”
Oh yeah? Then a whole bunch of them must have drifted north-east and voted in N. Glengarry-Prescott-Russell.
There all you climate/green sceptics go with the math again. Just stop it.
Sorta along the lines of this story,a local resident (here in SE Man) did a lot of construction work in the very far north few yrs back.I happened to have conv.with this gent at our local garage while getting oil-change done re the ‘native’ situation. This guy told me numerous stories about the waste/abuse of gov’t $$ up there,BUT most interesting was story about windmills for energy.He told me,that in few communities up there (wish I could remember the names),there were windmills,and he noticed they were sitting idle. When asking the residents why they were not working,the response? ‘We only fire them up when someone from the Gov’t or the CBC show up!’
Another little known problem with wind turbines is that each high capacity turbine requires up to 2,000 kg of permanent magnets made from the rare earth metal neodymium. The material is currently available only from China, where it is mined in an environmentally devastating manner. Moreover, the Chinese are slapping increasingly high export taxes on neodymium because it is so critical to their developing industrial economy.
Kevin, no one in the MSM ever understands the difference between power and energy. And whenever I’ve confronted them with the notion of capacity factor, it’s been the EGO (eyes glaze over) Effect all over again.
Sigivald:
Check out the world’s largest solar farm located in Lambton County Ontario. The entire project is located on prime farmland. Hundreds of acres taken out of production to accommodate these giant mirrors that produce minimal energy compared to conventional sources. This area of the world has supported some of the best dairy/beef operations for the past 150+ years.
Don’t worry, Jim. The eco-activists will be all over that as soon as they finish defending these bird-chopping, useless contraptions McGuinty threw upon us.
Donald and GordK are correct. Here’s some data to back it up.
http://theenergycollective.com/willem-post/169521/wind-turbine-energy-capacity-less-estimated
Wind turbines are the ‘pretty girls’ of the renewable energy family.
Fickle, high maintenance, and won’t put out like they said they would.
Wind power is just fleeting scam. The real energy source for the future is small scale nuclear.
http://www.npr.org/2013/02/04/170482802/are-mini-reactors-the-future-of-nuclear-power
I don’t see mention, at least often, the cost of braking the system. Meaning those big choppers have brakes installed on them as well, and that takes…wait for it…electricity to engage.
Whether stopping for maintenance, or locking into position for high winds, how much power does it take to stop?
So unless these are perpetual motion machines, what is the cost of braking/stopping these units?
Factor that in as well.
Donald A. Neil, don’t you know that cheap electricity is a crime against Gaia? I’ll bet the watermelons are hoping that anyone who remembers the days of $0.03/KWh electricity will die off soon and, if the educational system continues its devolution, there will be very few people around numerate enough to perform the simple calculations you did.
When we have $1/KWh electricity, then this bird blender will be profitable generating $1,328,764 worth of electricity/year. That way it would pay for itself in a little less than 2 years, assuming it didn’t break down before then. When that day comes, gas prices will have to be at least $30/gallon to prevent people from generating cheaper electricity with portable gasoline powered generators.
Of course, once the price of electricity has gone up that much, the economic collapse will be total and people will be heating their houses in the winter with stolen library books and shivering in the dark as no-one will be able to afford the $100 twisty bulbs which will be the only ones available. That is, if the people don’t rise up and slaugher all of the watermelons and render them into fat based candles. Libby Davis alone could probably light up a village for a winter with her blubber stores alone.
To try to fix this problem we should require anyone who wants to hold public office to have a minimal level of mathematical competence. I think, given the impact the decisions of politicians have on the population, this competency level should be at least a first year university calculus course as well as non-Gaussian statistics which better describes events in the real world (most people confuse the statistics of mediocristan with those of real world extremistan). It would take just a simple mathematical quiz that would be given to candidates in order of their vote count, and the first one who passes gets the position.
I doubt whether a single politician in Ontario would come even close to passing such an exam, but it seems that if the Ontario provincial legislature had instead been filled with people chosen totally at random from the voters rolls, then the province wouldn’t be in its current mess.
People generally get the government they deserve. The very best that corruption and money can buy.
There must be a good punchline connecting green idiots, windmill fraudsters,
their political enablers, and the most suitable abode for all of them to serve
their sentences. Looking through a barred cell window where they could see the
worn out junk they inflicted on the taxpayers would be a great opening to a
prison blues/crossover C+W music video. Working title: “Doin’ Green Scam Time”.