Oooops! (at least they didn't name it 'robust')

London Bridge is falling down,falling down, falling down,
London Bridge is falling down,
My fair lady.

If it can’t survive winds well above 50 mph then it is not fit for purpose.

“The bolts on the base could not withstand the wind ”
It seems they used cheap China steel bolts made from cars after the cash for clunkers program in the usa? Hardened bolts would of never broke and seems someone made the wrong choice. Time for the tax payers to pay up for replacing all the bolts on the turbines across the UK now?

From the DT comments.
This is not an isolated case, another wind turbine was destroyed near Bishop Auckland the same night.
http://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/10192330._/?ref=twtrec

Oh, but what CAUSED those unexceptional winds???? Hmmmmm? Bleccck. (/sarc just in case)

While I think these are a silly technology, I would guess a faulty material/installation as the root cause of this failure. Even ‘hurricane’ force winds are well below the 116mph maximum rating, which is about the top range for Chinook winds I’ve experienced east of the Rockies.

A few years ago we had the wrong kind of soil… http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/wrong-kind-of-soil-leaves-network-rails-autumn-plan-in-turmoil-579979.html
Wrong kind of snow… http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/weather/4434770/Snow-Britain-Wrong-kind-of-snow-strikes-again.html
Wrong kind of leaves… http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1338351/Parking-row-over-leaves-on-the-line.html
Now, the wrong kind of wind lol

I wonder how this event will be calculated into the return on investment profile of wind power.
Since it appears to be a complete loss, will it have a negative impact on the Energy Returned compared to the Energy Invested calculations?
I have a sneaking suspicion that any energy contribution the tower made will be added in on the plus side of ‘green energy’ but the loss (cost) will somehow be excluded.

What is the cost per kilowatt generated over a ten year span, considering you have to replace these every three years?

Note the “cut-out wind speed” [the wind speed at which the protective device fitted to a wind turbine is activated to prevent mechanical damage to the machine] is given as 25 m/s (56 mph). That is higher than this structure’s oops! speed. The photo shows a circular base through which the concrete-anchored rods fit. It seems undamaged! Perhaps they just stood it up and failed to put any nuts on the threads. Okay, not. But there’s a big ‘fail’ waiting to be revealed.

This could be a design flaw resulting from either the specification of substandard grade bolts or the use of bolts that were too small for the applied load. However, a more likely explanation is that the bolts were defective… counterfeit bolts of very poor quality are coming from China these days. It’s very difficult to visually see the difference between such conterfeits and the high quality bolts they mimic.

To be accurate, it looks like these “wind turbine” structures will have to be renamed “breeze turbines”.

Is this what they mean by ‘renewable’
Just put up another one, again and again……

“The bolts on the base could not withstand the wind”
For the Greenies to understand it, the statement must be changed to;
“The bolts were not sustainable”.

Not the first time: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2083149/Wind-turbines-cope-UK-weather-3-blown-pieces.html
Meanwhile: http://www.windbyte.co.uk/safety.html (nice photos of destroyed turbines)
“In the last five years there have been some 1,500 reported accidents/‘incidents’ in the UK resulting in 4 deaths and a further 300 injuries to workers. Many accidents are not reported and examples of industry cover-ups abound.”
I have been unable to get a solid answer to the question of who pays when a wind turbine is decommissioned (trans: rusts, explodes, falls over…). Wind companies are going bankrupt at a rate of knots, and ‘decommissioning bonds’ – well, you can trust them to pay up after 20 years, can’t you?
Semtex, anyone?

It looks like the j-bolts stayed behind (as they should have), and the threads (or more likely the nuts) failed. Probably to save $50 on nuts. I hope the contractor has a big, fat bond.

I can only assume that it was built in the USA or Europe, as we no longer have the ability for such “high tech” engineering.

North of 43 and south of 44,
See by designing the tower anchor bolts to shear off before the turbine was subjected to max survival wind speed they prevented the turbine from self destructing and throwing pieces of it’s blades into nearby homes. 🙂

BLACK PEARL says:
January 30, 2013 at 8:31 am
Imagine the cost of decommissioning the ones out at sea.
————————————————————————–
With the contracts going to the companies that erected them, no doubt.
Post-modern digging and filling ditches ?

£250,000 for something that can – at best – produce enough electricity to power five or six domestic electric showers. Ye Gods.

On behalf of the contractor: the bolts could be fine – the feathering mechanism could be kaput. We’ll need to await the independent inquiries conducted by Lord Oxburgh and Geoffrey Boulton, Esq. to obfuscate the matter completely.

Greens are foolishly funny, strange when they individually are such humourless twerps.
The cost of nuclear is pumped to the stratosphere by demanding decommissioning costs be included, yet wind seems to have no such proviso , on the big island Hawaii there are two wind farms, on one the subsidy has expired.
Some ducks die in a Ft McMurray tailing pond, and a flame war ensues, endangered raptors are being diced world wide and the same people turn a blind eye.
The focus on feel good nonfunctioning solutions, indicates even the greens know there is no problem.
But do not worry the windmill owners will “prove” that local terrorists caused the fall of their flawless creation.
The local witches did it.

Or they did not used the spec’ed washers. A common cause of catastrophic engineering failure, often poorly understood by the tradesmen.

I’m glad we are getting more and more photos of these failures. Wyoming is supposed to be the “wind capital” of the US. No one seems to understand a 40mph Average means 80 miles an hour winds some days, none on others. It’s very common to have high wind warnings here with 40 mph sustained winds and gusts over 75. The toll that takes on turbines has to be very high, not to mention the cutout speed. This is a case of “more’s law” not applying….

are we going to cancel the order of chocolate teapots now?
/sarc

It seems to have grown by 4 storeys after falling down. According to the article; “The £250,000 tower, which stood as tall as a six storey building, was hit by gale force gusts of 50mph.”

“Given its, ahem, endurance, one wonders if the council will allow it to be reconstructed. I’m thinking no.”
YOU THINK???
http://www.thisisnorthdevon.co.uk/35-metre-wind-turbine-collapses-Bradworthy/story-17994623-detail/story.html
“Of greater concern is that Torridge District Council have recently approved the erection of a second turbine of the same size and manufacture at this location that would have been closer to the public road.”
“A number of similar turbines have been approved and erected locally and the safety of these turbines must now be questioned, together with that of the much larger ones that have also been approved but not yet built”
Don’t bet on it

Mayhaps the gentle knight from La Mancha has gone dragonhunting in foreign lands ?

cui bono says:
January 30, 2013 at 8:56 am
/////////////////////////////////////
Off shore maintenance will be a nightmare.
The safety issues surrounding working in a windswept sea environment are far more substantial. There will be many more accidents, which eventually will lead to stringent H&S requirement which will mean that maintenance can only be conducted during prolonged periods of good weather. This will mean that faulty windmills will have long periods of downtime and there will be substantial standby charges pertaining to supply ships and workers standing idly by waiting for breaks in the weather.
The government has very much underestimated the wear and tear of extreme sea environments and the difficulties and expense in servicing and maintenance. Unfortunately, it will be the tax payer and consumer that will have to pay the price for all this madness and government incompetence.

For a building structure in open countryside the design wind speed should be approx 110 miles per hour. If we take into account that this is a cylindrycal tower I consider it should be designed for a wind speed in excess of 150 mph if not more. I am trying to keep this simple so just remember the wind speed converts directly to force.
For the ulltimate limit state of collapse a rough factor of safety would be three.
Thus the tower should be designed for a wind speed of 450 mph, remember wind speed converts to force.
On the table above it says the survival wind force is 115mph, so lets assume they have a factor of safety of three on this. So the tower at the ultimate limit state could stand a wind force of 345 mph and would therefore fail if my figures are correct?
Now if the wind speed was 50 mph and Factor of Safety is three the ultimate limit state for collapse would be a wind force of 150mph.
Thus the tower has been underdesigned by 300%. Assuming the collapse is not down to extremely bad workmanship.
The moral of this story is that wind turbines are not just a danger to birds and bats but also to humans.
Apologies for not converting wind speed to forces but its easily done 🙂

Stonyground says:
I remember reading a book called ‘Windpower Workshop’ by a guy who made a living building wind generators for dwellings that were so remote that it was not economically viable to connect them to the grid. His turbines were made from very basic materials, the generator itself was made from the hub and brake drum of a truck. The thing about the book was that it was very realistic and pragmatic about the practicalities of wind power. In a remote place, gas, oil or solid fuel can be used for heating and cooking, the wind turbine provides lighting, runs the fridge and freezer, the computer and the TV. For the benefit of anyone who was connected to the grid but thought that a turbine would save them money, it was emphasised in the book that the bank of batteries needed to store the power would have a finite life and the cost of replacing them every five years or so would outweigh any savings in your electricity bill.
The lesson that I gained from reading the book was that windpower can be useful in very specific circumstances. Outside those specific circumstances, it is a total waste of time.

{ Phillip Bratby says:
January 30, 2013 at 11:34 am
The Endurance E-3120 wind turbine is American/Canadian……… When you buy a cheap outdated design, you expect failures. When you have cowboy developers involved in the process, you get what you pay for. }
Just about time you paid us back for financing WWII.
Thanks.

So, they have a lifespan of 25 years. Hah! I’ve been scratching my head trying to understand how they work out that the EROEI of onshore windfarms are as high as 15:1. Why does it take such a large subsidy to get them built, I wondered, if the EROEI is comparable with most fossil fuels.
I think its because the people making these investment decisions, laugh up their sleeves at the 25 year figure, and assume something much lower. Not quite this low, however.

Maybe they were trying out a new form of ‘carbon capture’?
If it falls on your head they have caught a ‘carbon lifeform’.

So the profit just got turned up on that wind turbine. By chopping it up and selling it for parts/scraps!

cui bono says:
January 30, 2013 at 8:56 am
…Meanwhile: http://www.windbyte.co.uk/safety.html (nice photos of destroyed turbines)…
*
OMG – so many! I had no idea. You were right about the nice photos. Frantastic pics of burning and broken turbines. Thanks for that link, Cui bono.

Unprecedented! It’s worse than we thought.

Tim Clark says:
January 30, 2013 at 12:13 pm
{ Phillip Bratby says:
January 30, 2013 at 11:34 am
The Endurance E-3120 wind turbine is American/Canadian……… When you buy a cheap outdated design, you expect failures. When you have cowboy developers involved in the process, you get what you pay for. }
Just about time you paid us back for financing WWII.
Thanks.
Actually we did finish paying off our wartime debts just 6 years ago.
Britain to make its final payment on World War II loan from U.S. – Business – International Herald Tribune, December 28, 2006.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/28/business/worldbusiness/28iht-nazi.4042453.html?_r=0
We finished repaying our debts to the Canadians at the same time but rather typically the International Herald Tribune ignored Canada. We certainly need the US loans at the time but nevertheless there has always been mixed feelings about them in Britain because it was in the US interest to support us and the US was probably the only country to emerge from World War II richer than it started. Britain, in contrast, emerged from the war effectively bankrupt.
During the Napoleonic Wars Britain provided enormous sums of money to its allies and quite a lot of that was in the form of subsidies, not loans, because we knew it was in our interest to help them. The total British expenditure on the Napoleonic Wars was, in relative terms, greater than that in World War I and comparable to that in World War II.
Getting back to the subject of the environment, the “war” against CAGW would, if the Greens get their way, be as expensive as that of the Napoleonic Wars and the two World Wars and would probably not be in the interests of any country.

RossP 12:47pm:
“Since when is 50mph gust gale force?”
A moderate gale starts at 31mph on the Beaufort Scale. 50mph is a strong gale on the Beaufort. I imagine that the steady speed would be over 31 to gust at 50.

All they need is a short sharp chop near the base on the lee side when the wind is blowing.

Built to the highest available standards!

50 KW for 250,000 pounds? What a bargain! I found this in about 15 secs on Google
http://www.affordablegenerator.com/50kW_60Hz_Cummins_Diesel_Generator_p/agc50.htm
50 KW of continuous output for $13K. I made no attempt to find the cheapest one available just grabbed one from a familiar company from the top of the queue. You could buy 3 of them and have backed up continuous 50 KW of power and $300K to buy fuel for the next 25 yrs for just the purchase tab of this flopper.

My luck is good today. I just watched a trash can blow over. Fortunately it fell off of the road and not in front of the oncoming school bus. Don’t know if that windmill would have made it.

Time to set a bunch of metal thieves loose on these bird-choppers…..
it’d be a wind-win situation…

And that was a baby turbine. Here in Ontario Canada they are routinely erecting turbines from 300 to 500 feet high. (100 meters plus). This is easily checked by retrieving the latest wind turbine specifications — if you have doubts.

MattS,
I see, that would be one or more PE with a revoked ticket in my book.
Then silly me, I’d expect the thing to stand up.

One factor i never see mentioned for wind turbines is the range of cyclic resonances created by first, the wind swirling around the round tower, the induced turbulence of which is known to create cyclic resonances at certain wind speeds and relative to both the diameters of the tower and the actual materials used as well as the strength and thickness of the tower’s materials.
Then there are the induced cyclic frequencies from the blades which are a direct result of blade design, pitch at the time and rotational velocities.
As a number of these resonances may combine to reinforce one another at very specific wind speeds and blade rotational velocities there is a closed loop with rapidly rising intensity of resonances.
Generally the wind speed varies so much in seconds that the effect is very limited and very quickly moves out of the critical band so no effect is seen immediately.
However constant up and down cycling through this critical resonance band leads to fatigue accumulation in the structure until it finally fails in what seems to be quite mild conditions.
If the foundations are built into some hard rock then it is likely that the resonance band changes all over again as the foundations will also be involved in the the whole structure’s critical resonating and cyclic frequency fatigue band.
All of this is well known in the aviation industry in particular
I have heard of some kilometres of concrete Power poles, newly erected but with no wire strung on them just failing en-masse due to strong winds that induced the pole’s natural cyclic resonances, which undamped by the wire, fatigued the concrete poles overnight. When the crews arrived to string the poles they found the lot as just shattered lumps of concrete from the overnight winds.
Piston engines of every type have this particular resonance problem which will lead to the rapid destruction of the engine but engines generally are designed to operate outside of the critical resonance range so the public are unaware of the problem.
Some piston aircraft engines operate each side of this critical resonance RPM range and you simple don’t operate those engines inside of that narrow critical RPM range .

The real point here is the confirmation of extreme weather caused by AGW, without which the wind tower would have had a long and productive life. 😉
Back in 1965, at the UK’s Central Electricity Generating Board’s HQ, I got a report on my desk that cooling towers at the you-beaut super-duper Selby power station had been wind-tunnel tested to withstand 200 mph (320 kph) gales. That night, three fell down in much more modest winds, with three deaths. It turned out that the tests had been done with a model of a single tower, no consideration had been given to the intensifying effect of a cluster of towers, something which everyone in high-rise cities experiences often. Had the wind-millers done due diligence?

Evidently an erectile dysfunction.

More seriously; other than a design flaw (which is quite plausible given the gross ignorance about the structural loading; especially dynamic), it is possible that the wrong nuts or steel for the bolts was used. Or that they were incorrectly tightened. Corrosion should not be a factor, but cannot be ruled out unless checked. The “bolts” in such structures are usually the threaded ends of the steel reinforcing cages of the concrete footings. Concrete is usually required unless one has a rock of sufficient strength in which case holes are drilled and the bolts epoxied into place.
The windmill in this case is a small one. The photos don’t show extreme undulations so the wind velocity profile is pretty flat above 10 metres height. (Ever wondered why there are few tall trees in the plains?)

The engineers will figure it out, looks like a failure at the base.
They live for this kind of stuff, failure stress cracks in metal.
Harmonics, did it lose a blade and shake apart, gear box lubrication failure, etc.

I hope the three little piggies weren’t at home.

Chris Beal says:
January 30, 2013 at 7:51 am
Hardened bolts would of never broke.
I think you mean High Tensile bolts.

Well the load on the bolts would increase at least as the square of the wind speed, so 116 mph / 50 mph squared is over five times the load these bolts were supposed to be able to withstand.
I’m guessing it was a fatigue failure caused by the built in shake yourself to pieces oscillation.
At 42 rpm, and three blades, the gizmo has a built in 126 cycle per minute oscillation due to wind shear.
Wind speed at the top of the mast is higher than at deck height; every sailor knows that. so a blade at the top has a higher axial and tangential thrust than when it is at the bottom in lower wind. If it was a linear relationship, the three phase 42 cpm driving force would even out, but since it is at least a squared relationship, they do not cancel out either axial thrust or rotary torque, so those bolts get hammered with a 126 cpm jack hammer, till they simply crap out.
Ever notice that the old farm windmill pump had about 20 or so blades, and the diameter is small compared to the tower height; no wonder they run for a hundred years.

The wind turbines in the UK are all designed to fail during a hurricane, and we do occasionally get hurricanes here.
It’s a scam.

Backs of envelopes are great for fact checking… I found a link supposedly relating to this:
http://www.pse.com/inyourcommunity/kittitas/Pages/Wild-Horse.aspx
Among the fast facts enumerated were :
‘The construction of each tower’s foundation required 120 anchor bolts, 30,954 nuts, and 11,750 cubic yards of concrete. Each anchor bolt is 28 feet long and weighs approximately 150 lbs.’
That implies a nut every 33mm on each anchor bolt, and a block of concrete 22 metres on a side.
Like, wow.

I can see one of these wind turdbines from my front room window. Identical. Praying for more wind.
Ivor Ward

Looks like the blade control lost it and the blades spun up until the the turbine caught fire. Lots of pictures here.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2270029/UK-weather-Heavy-floods-wreak-havoc-gale-force-winds-sends-115ft-turbine-ground.html

BLACK PEARL says:
January 30, 2013 at 8:31 am
Imagine the cost of decommissioning the ones out at sea.
========
the sea buries the dead.

Engineering designs often overlook dynamic loads because of the complexity in calculations, and instead rely on static loads with a safety factor. At the correct wind speed is should be expected that a free standing tower will begin to oscillate at its natural frequency, which can eventually bring down the structure, no matter how strong the materials.
Successful designs avoid the problem by making sure that the natural frequency of the structure lies outside that which can occur naturally. Ignore this rule and large buildings collapse during earthquakes and bridges collapse when troops march on them. Not because the structure is weak, but rather because of the loads imposed by harmonic oscillation.

Juice: Cripes! Green energy so raised the cost of fuel in cash-strapped Greece that it is reported the forests are being clear cut and the wood smoke is so bad that air quality is approaching that of London in the 1950s (i.e. TOXIC).

Dennis Ray Wingo says:
January 30, 2013 at 10:50 pm
Your back of the envelope calculation is sligthly confusing as you used foundation data for a much bigger unit tha 50 kwh , so let’s recalculate a bit, the foundation data in the example is from an article that gives peak power ( nameplate ?) capacity of 273 Mw from 149 turbines ( taking up 10000 acres of land , what a waste , but that is side issue here ) or a little over 1.8 Mw average peak power per single turbine, so it is equivalent to somwhere around 400-450 Kw constant power equivalent , delivering ~4000 Mwh/yr or 4million KWh/year. Using your figure of 0.909 kg/Kwh Co2 savings gives 3636 tons/year so it will take a little over 10 years of problem free running to offset the Co2 generated while making the concrete used in the foundation. Now we should probaly also add to the Co2 bill the amount for 230 tons of steel used in the tower body plus maybe another 20 to 30 tons of same in the bolts and concrete reinforcing in the foundation , plus the 20-30 tons of composite materials in the propellers and the hubcasing and so on . I have no data over how much that would sum up to , but a first wild guess would be that it woulda add at least 2 – 3 years to the Co2 breakeven point. So it would first be after running for 12 – 13 years that an installation like this would have a chance to claim any Co2 savings. And if history is anything to go by, at that time it would most likely have detoriated to generating only about 65-70% of the energy it does when in it’s first year of life , it’s accumulated maintainance and running cost would probably have reached the same amount or more as the orginal installation price, and who knows maybe the subsidy period would be running out within a year of two. In other word it migth have become “unsustainable” , and the might preparing to pull the plug and walk away, leaving the cleaning up of his now usless junk to future generation ( the grandhildren of the green’s ).
“What were the greens thinking” you ask. I sure do not know, but I suspect tha tey prefer not to think at all.

“I think they need to start ‘weld / staking’ the nuts… then again, a bag of thermite is pretty easy to use too. I wonder if they gave any thought at all to how hard it would be to prevent sabotage on a widely distributed load of these things?”
Indeed! I am wondering how long before Al Q’aieda figure out that this could be an easy route to causing infrastructure damage. But then, I suppose, if nobody dies, they wouldn’t call it terrorism.

[i]Of course, Ms. Gray calls a 50 mph wind a “high wind”[/i]
Here, in Las Cruces, NM, we call that March.
A nice day in March, at that.

Well I’m one of those who don’t think much of wind tubines, except for a few niche situations.
And I agree with those “environmentalists” who think they are an ugly eyesore; well any structure out in a wilderness area is an ugly eyesore, and that is about the limit of my agreement with “earth firsters”.
But the thought that anyone would sabotage one of these wind turbines, for some end or other, is about on a par with those who break into research labs, and turn loose lab animals, without any idea of what havoc they may be wreaking. NO ! I don’t condone any mistreatment of animals.
So these tower collapses in Britain seem to be more political collapses, than technological.
Hopefully, most of us are more adult than that.
But I have to say that #0.25M or it’s $ equivalent seems like a big waste of money. My small fuel efficient liquid rock burning automobile churns out more than double the KW output of that recent downed turbine tower. And I could buy myself a whole fleet of 20 or more of these autos, for what was spent on that turbine.