This seems like a candidate for the FAIL blog, hence my caption.
Here’s the story:
“We can’t control the weather,” Julie Vitek said in an interview from company headquarters in Houston, Texas. “We’re looking to see if we can cope with it more effectively, through the testing of a couple of techniques.”
She says the conditions in northern New Brunswick have wreaked havoc on the wind farm this winter.
“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.
“This weather pattern has been particularly challenging.”
Full article here
h/t to a whole bunch of WUWT readers, “TomRude” being the first.
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Anthony
It would be useful to have a reference page on wind so as to collate all these interesting posts in one place.
Good to see another example of how hopeless these things are. The public need to organise a petition seeking to ban them.
As the name suggests, I am from around those parts. In 46 years I have never been tempted to describe our typical winter as cold and dry. Dry? Did they notice that little thing called the ocean just across the way?
To be fair, which I admit is boring, having time to sort issues like this out is a reason for pushing pilot wind projects: the argument is that they won’t become profitable until their proved technology, but they won’t become proved technology until we really use them for a while, so they need to be subsidised for now. That’s reasonable as far as it goes.
The real objection to wind power is the sheer quantity of engineering and fragile machinery needed to produce a very small amount of power — there are bound to be better ways.
I don’t care because I don’t have a job and it cost me nothing. BTW I hate people.
Oopsie.
A second part of the (numerous) failures of wind power’s inability to maintain generation output over time is the effect on the conventional very large power plant machinery: The turbines, generators, boilers, pumps, motors, and the extreme loss of machinery lifetimes due to excess cycles.
These are very large, very heavy, very thick-walled and very closely toleranced dynamic machines – but paradoxically – very fragile pieces of extremely high speed gear. The extra up-and-down cycles of the wind power machines “break” the planned long-term running of the regular power plants – so their life cycles are dropped, and maintenance costs increased, by 1/3 to 1/4.
It’s equal to requiring 30% MORE operating costs (or a 30% shorter lifetime) of the rest of the grid.
My favorite line is “We can’t control the weather”, yet the purpose of all these wind farms is supposedly to control the entire climate. Which seems to me a little harder to do.
They probably don’t even comprehend the irony of the statement.
Windmill cause global cooling
What a joke wind turbines are. No sane engineer would touch such a ridiculous way of generating electricity with somebody else’s bargepole. Take away the subsidies and sanity would prevail.
Why don’t they put electric heaters in the things, so that when the wind stops and the frost comes they can keep the units from freezing?
Well, they have to have back-up generating plants anyway, don’t they?
If only we could burn more fossil fuels, increase CO2, warm the planet….then these renewable low carbon energy producers would still work.
/sarc
What do you suppose will happen when these monuments to economic illiteracy are no longer subsidized by a gullible public and are decommissioned? My late Uncle owned a great deal of farmland in Illinois and refused multiple offers to lease land for wind turbines. His neighbors thought he was crazy as each lease pays $8K to $10K per year. His great fear was that he would end up owning them and would have to pay decommissioning costs or that the structures, if left standing, would increase his property tax rates.
He was a very wise man…….he’s been gone almost 3 years now.
A perfect illustration of why you have to do the science right. If you don’t, mother nature will kick your butt, sooner or later. I don’t have any problem with “green energy” per se, as long it is backed up with solid science, solid engineering & solid (ie non-subsidized) economics.
Don’t worry, with Global Warming coming soon to a landscape near you, it’ll never happen again, Al says so, anyway.
“The shutdown has not had any effect on employment at the site, which provides 12 permanent jobs.”
=======================================================
lol, well, one can view it as a jobs program that sometimes generates electricity. Not when people need it, mind you, but when things are pleasant, dry and breezy. Must be well worth the $200,000,000 .
“We can’t control the weather,” Julie Vitek said in an interview from company headquarters in Houston, Texas.
Isn’t this the underlying reason to have windmills, because we think we can/do control the weather.
“We can’t control the weather”, I thought that was why they were building all these windmills.
A couple weeks ago, there was a post here that speculated that wind power was to blame for the rolling blackouts in Texas.
Turns out that wind power was doing just fine during the critical times in Texas; it was gas and coal units that were down.
Quoth Trip Doggett of ERCOT:
Previous to these facts coming out, the author and Anthony had pivoted with some “what I/he really meant was” talk about a hypothetical world in which the money to build wind turbines had instead been invested in coal/nukes/etc.
This was quite a pivot, given that the original post was very specific about speculating that the wind wasn’t blowing in Texas at the right times, and the word “reserve” (as in “spinning reserve”) wasn’t even mentioned in the original article.
So, we had a post about the failings of wind power, even though it was in fact fossil plants that had failed.
So, for those keeping score: At WUWT:
If a windpower source stops producing due to cold weather: Wind power fail
If fossil sources stop producing due to cold weather: Wind power fail
(PS- the article notes that these problems are specific to this wind farm, and that other more northerly wind farms don’t have this problem. Interesting).
“We cant control the weather”, Julie Vitek said in an interview from company headquarters in Houston, Texas.
—
We’ll we can’t control the weather be we CAN control the climate! RIGHT?? \sarc
“We can’t control the weather.”
But we can control the climate (by using wind power).
” “We can’t control the weather,” Julie Vitek said in an interview from company headquarters in Houston, Texas.”
Maybe someone needs to tell this to Al Gore and camp!
Yes, we can’t control the weather and most likely we will not be able to do so for at least a few hundred more years!
If these wind turbines have been completely shut down for several weeks the blades will most likely warp. I understand that they are slowly rotated when there isn’t enough wind so that the blades don’t warp!
L O L. Oops. ‘Hey Bill – did you factor in ice?’ ‘Oh, crap’
Irony served cold.
Who will take down this crap? Or will it just be left for the public to take down, like they do in California.
“We can’t control the weather.”
Funny, aren’t these people always claiming the weather isn’t a problem with wonderful wind?
Maybe they could get some coal, build a power plant, install some heaters….
Oh!. Wait! What happened to all the smudge pots (aka “orchard heaters) that used to keep us in oranges and grapefruit and lemons and stuff? Do they still do the “Fruit Frost Service in Pomona” thing on KFI at 8:00 P.M.? What was his name?