Who would have thunk? Maybe it had something to do with this video of a Vestas wind turbine:
I wonder if it used “Lucas” electronic parts? I owned an Austin Healy Sprite and a Triumph TR6 at one time, and the failure above looks familiar.
Excerpts from an article in the Guardian:
Vestas is to shut down its Isle of Wight factory in the face of collapsing demand from a wind-farming industry hobbled by the recession and red tape.
The group had planned to convert the factory in Newport so it could make blades for the British market, but said this morning that the paralysis gripping the industry meant that orders had ground to a halt. Such low demand could not justify the investment, Ditlev Engel, the chief executive, told the Guardian.
The UK’s only wind turbine manufacturing plant is to close, dealing a humiliating blow to the government’s promise to support low-carbon industries.”
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/apr/28/vestas-wind-turbine-factory-close
See Vestas Wind Power Solutions here
Of course, windmills produce clean emissions free power, they don’t pollute.
Just to be fair, anyone have video or photos of a coal fired power plant exploding or uncontrollably catching fire?
h/t to David Segesta
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
OT but… I drove an Austin Healy Sprite (1967 vintage) through high school and for a number of years after. Fun little car, but you really needed to be an amateur mechanic to own one.
Reply: Everyone, please stay on topic. ~dbstealey, mod.
Actions speak louder than words. In this case they are screaming.
Mike
Quick, US congress and Obama need to Bailout and stimulate profitable green jobs, now is the time to act decisively.
Hurrah. Sense will return. We need to get on and build coal and nuclear.
We see advertisements on TV from the alternative energy supporters about wind power being “Free” . It’s free energy, they state. Compared to coal or natural gas power plants; Nuclear power or even Hydro-Electric plants start up and operating cost, wind energy should be damn cheap. Why then is power from wind energy so expensive? Why do utilities who generate electricity from wind turbines need a subsidy or need to charge rate payers more for power generated from wind?
AAHH yes Lucas Electric. Otherwise known as the Prince of Darkness, since you had to be home by nighttime because your not sure if your lights will come on. I had a GT6 MKIII and had to hot wire the lights to get them to work.
Wait until folks figure out what alternative energy really means and what it will really cost. Then the fun begins.
I watched a news story from Britain on how nobody wanted the wind turbines (towers) near them or on roads where they drive because it wrecks the view and creates a slight swishing sound. So no one wants to build them or have them built anywhere around them and yet all these people want to consume green power…. well something has to give and the environmentalists just don’t get it.
No none wants wind turbines, natural gas plants, nuclear power plants, or coal power plants built…. yet they all want to consume power like we have some magical process to create it – and if there is a shortage, they all will be the first to scream bloody murder, well I think they’re going be screaming unless they allow us to build.
Wow so this is one negative outcome of the wind energy theroies. Hmmm I’m still in proposition for such a thing. Wind energy has a lot of potential, that systems was probably outdated.
The only markets left are….the minds of goblal warmers (the only things on earth really melting down). In the future only imaginary windmills will be built, under controlled dreaming conditions, at asylums all over the world.
One of the most important human right, the right to a healthy life was finally enforced on global warming individuals, who, thank to these measures, will be free to build their dreamed “Brave New Woirld” in safe confinement.
Here’s a british news clip about that Danish incident. A family who lives 500 meters from the crashed windmill had parts of the construction flying over their house. :/
“Why then is power from wind energy so expensive? Why do utilities who generate electricity from wind turbines need a subsidy or need to charge rate payers more for power generated from wind?”
TComa,
To generate enough power they have to construct many many turbines covering a lot of land. The material and labour power doesn’t come cheap and they want to make profits too. But the biggest expense is actually the land that the turbines are built on. Miles of turbines fall upon both government and privately owned land. Only in a few cases does land belong to companies who build the turbines. The rents and rates that have to be paid are very high because of the amount of land that the turbines cover. Think how much an out of town shopping mall pays in rents and rates yet takes up far less space.
These videos prove that wind turbines will create jobs. People to build them, fix them, put the fires out, and tear them down. They will be sustainable because mechanical things continue to fail. When a PV system fails, they just stop working.
TComa, in my engineering opinion, the reason it is so expensive is the ratio of cost of building and maintaince to energy output is higher for a wind turbine. The idea that wind power is free is marketing hype.
I have a hard time understanding all the opposition to any new form of energy on this site. All the same things could have been said and probably were said about the horseless carriage (noisy, unreliable, dangerous), the cost of converting from steam and whale oil to petro, the lack of roads to support cars, the lack of gas stations. On and on. New concepts take time, trial and error. Bucks change hands, fortunes are won and lost. It’s just a new face on the same old same old.
Chill.
Perhaps someone here could pass on their thoughts regarding these turbines. I understand the inefficiencies associated with putting wind farms on the power grid. What if the turbines were to be used to perform electrolysis on water on site? That would eliminate the need to wire the turbine to the grid, and I don’t think it would matter at what speed the blades were turning as long as current was generated.
It would produce a fairly reliable supply of a scarce and valuable resource. Any thoughts?
Interesting article on the worldwide cascade effect of adopting any new Kyoto-style treaty: click
[scroll down to “Bound To Burn”]
I wonder, every time this issue appears here in WUWT, if Miguel de Cervantes in his “The ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha”, where Don Quixote battles against the windmills, believing them to be dragons, really predicted the not less irrational and preposterous idea of windmills’ generators. So, undoutbtely predicting the appearance in our century of another ingenious gentleman called Don Anthony Watts.
http://www.spanisharts.com/books/quijote/thequijote.htm
TComa
Basically because wind is only about 20% efficient i.e. you need to install 5 MW of generating capacity for every 1 MW of sustained power. Further, it is intermittent so you need a natural gas turbine or a coal (horrors!) fired plant running on standby for those times when the wind doesn’t blow at all. If that’s not enough, note that all those turbines scattered over the countryside need a power line run to them to collect the power. It is estimated that the $150 billion that the new president wants to spend on “sustainable” energy would only be enough to build about a third of that collection network … and that’s before you put up any windmills at all.
In the clip they say “The collapse is a reminder that even a man made machine can be pushed beyond its limits by mother nature.”
Anyone who wants money for research on that global warm… climate change force mother nature to crash turbines easily get them, I think! 😉
Cory (10:03:20) :
No none wants wind turbines, natural gas plants, nuclear power plants, or coal power plants built…. yet they all want to consume power like we have some magical process to create it – and if there is a shortage, they all will be the first to scream bloody murder, well I think they’re going be screaming unless they allow us to build.
Exactly. The people fighting the coal plants in western Kansas aren’t volunteering to turn off their A/C, furnace, dishwasher, stove, TV, DVD player, MP3 player, computer or cell phone. But where do they think the energy will come from?
Imagine a world where AGW believers ‘walked the walk’. I want to see them turn off their appliances and conveniences. If they all do that, we wouldn’t need any new power plants.
UK Singer-songwriter Alan Price wrote a great song a while ago now in the early 1980’s entitled, “England, my England”. In one verse he sums up Britain completely, “in an island built on coal, & with oil beneath the sea, we struggle to get by & we’ve joined the EEC!”, (EEC was what is now the EU). We were told back then that the UK had enough coal reserves for 200+ years at current demand! So we shut down the mines because Margaret Thatcher was battling the miners strike, & her plan to get a renewed nuclear programme back-fired as a result (sorry if I’ve said this before) becasue of the green lobbyists. It is true that Chenobyl didn’t help the argument & put nuclear back 20 years as greenist upon greenist siezed upon the incident as “proof” of nuclears poor safety record, it is the safest industry I know to date, with the only exception as already noted. It’s a shame becuase virtually none of the fears about it have ever surfaced, rather like DDT. We’ve been saying things like those lyrics in the UK for donkey’s years. Greenism destroys economies. They’re deluding themselves which I have no objection to, but do when they try to delude me!
These wind turbines are dangerous, deadly to bird life, inefficient, & expensive things to build & run without massive taxpayer funded subsidies. If these turbines were the Golden Egg we’re supposed to believe they would have built thousands yesars ago. There was one at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory for well over 20 years on experiment that worked intermittently. We will need more fossil fuel power stations to keep them going when the wind won’t blow on standby/base load demand. Not much oil left under the North-Sea at the moment as I understand it, unless more exploration can demonstrate that it’s there & viable! Lets get sensible & build coal & nuclear power stations, before the oil really does run out & the Russian gas price hits the stratosphere! North-Sea gas will start to run out if it isn’t already. The coal-fired stations can even have their silly carbon capture technology facility, from what I understand the government has merely said they need the capability for CCS, but not that it needs to actually work, a bit like having an air dam & spoiler on a Citroen 2CV, it’ll never reach a speed to benefit from either addition! They can’t even do their sums right. We now have to buy in pulverized fuel ash for concrete making to reduce the amount of cement in it for certain types of works when we had loads of it ourselves & didn’t know what to do with it.
Love the video clips of these things self-distructing – excellent! Let’s have many more for the collection.
Having a bunch of little machines is a maintenance headache.
This is an infamous problem in the computer industry called the “Blockbuster Problem” where they used to have a single server in each of their stores. One store, fine, 10,000 stores – you are a fool if you work for them.
I think people put wind in without doing the full life cycle costs of the system. Just imagine the cost of getting parts machined 10 years from now as they begin to break. I’ve sat in so many meetings where people do not think 3-5-10-20 years down the road and do the full costs of doing business. You need to factor in maintenance for the whole period – not just labor, but parts and whole refurbishment of all the systems or forklift upgrades – and then you have to take care of that maintenance tail to make sure its there when you need it.
Dan Gibson (10:14:49) :
I have a hard time understanding all the opposition to any new form of energy on this site. All the same things could have been said and probably were said about the horseless carriage (noisy, unreliable, dangerous), the cost of converting from steam and whale oil to petro, the lack of roads to support cars, the lack of gas stations. On and on. New concepts take time, trial and error. Bucks change hands, fortunes are won and lost. It’s just a new face on the same old same old.
Chill.
I am opposed to being forced to replace something that is reliable and inexpensive with something unreliable and expensive.
It’s not new energy that I oppose and I’m no fan of ‘Big Oil’. But if wind and solar really worked, nobody would have to force me to use it. People didn’t give up the horse and buggy for the automobile because of the government but because they wanted to.
Nobody mandated the candle companies out of business so we’d buy light bulbs. And not everyone rushed out to electrify their homes, either. Most people waited until electricity was affordable and reliable before wiring their homes and businesses.
Believe me, if you come up with a new energy source that’s as cheap and reliable as fossil fuels and is cleaner, I’ll line up to buy it.
Adam Smith predicted that some companies will fold, while others prosper. GE is backlogged with wind orders.