Wind power gets bent out of shape in Wyoming

I suppose a hydroelectric rig could be down due to weather; drought – caused by global warming of course.

My ignorance,
What is a Record “Low High”? does it mean biggest (high) in magnitude for the Lowest temperature of the day?
TIA

Once there was a silly old ram
Thought he’d punch a hole in a fan
No one could make that ram scram
He kept buttin’ that fan
‘Cause he had hi-i-igh hopes, he had hi-i-igh hopes
He had high apple pi-i-ie-in-the-sk-y-y hopes
So, any time your feelin’ bad,
‘Stead of feelin’ sad,
Just remember those fans
Oops, there goes those kilowatt fans
Oops, there goes those kilowatt fans
Oops, there goes those kilowatt fans

This is the poster of the collapse of CAWG

Shock and awe. /Sarc off. To be expected. Subsidized low cost products designed with an ideal environment in mind. In reality they need power inflow for heaters to keep this from happening which means that often wind turbines are net users of power instead of net producers – at least in Europe. What to you wanna bet they get a grant to study what went wrong and at least a couple of expense paid trips to Europe to see how it is done there?

In case someone missed this classic video of an exploding windmill:
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=8be_1203819244

That is a very expensive problem. If the conditions were right for one tower to fail then it is likely that more than one collapsed. I have been unable to find any additional news about this particular incident.
Solar is also very effective in a snowzilla storm like that. Gee.. I wonder what type of power would be effective for a long time and work even in bad weather…

Met my neighbour on Monday, told him of the weather being wet and windy inc gales for next few days, his reply ‘Loads of extra work for me then’ , which as he maintains the local Wind turbines that have been marooned since the start of Nov does not make much sense.

Yes well. Umm err. Quite.
Not perhaps the finest engineering. And who is paying for the loss?
Insured no doubt so who payed the premiums? and what was the rate percent?
And can anybody get any answers? as regards the cash that is?
Somehow I doubt it. And whose responsibility was it anyway?
I think we should be told.
We won’t be of course.
Kindest Regards

Looks like a ductile rather than brittle failure of the tower. Maybe the windmill froze and didn’t feather so that loads exceeeded the design limit. The tower seems to have failed at 90 degrees to the axis of the shaft with the blades at 90 degrees to the wind. Maybe some oscillation involved too. Guess that door didn’t help either.

Some panel beating and a bit of pollyfilla and she’l be right mate.

The second – iconic pic for WUWT stuff?

Wind Turbine suffers “erectile dysfunction”

Wizzy new Pius Hybrid – 28 Thousand Dollars
Wizzy new windmill, with local utility contract of 14 cents/Kilowatt-hr to pay for it – 250 Thousand dollars
Finding your new investment in a heap of twisted frozen metal? – … yep. Priceless.

Every time I drive by a rotating wind turbine just off the local interstate, I am struck again by how unsafe it looks. What happens if the axle cracks or a blade breaks off in a strong wind? Nothing good …

Would be interesting to know how many turbines have collapsed or shed blades in recent years.

‘Record daily low high’ –
Stress-testing the language?

I wonder how the Australian wind farms are going to cope with 300 km per hour winds. A constant wind won’t pose a problem. The big gusts typical of a cold front passage do the work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wind_farms_in_Queensland

Oh – I LOVE that picture..!!

Please send copies of the photos to Joe “Rantin’ Joe” Romm c/o CAP in Washington, DC!

Yeah but, I hear those unanticipated and excessive deliveries of coal can shut a plant right down.

I suppose sildenafil citrate is out of the question, for resurrecting these derelict assemblages

Oops! Back to the drawingboard.

This is a good example of some of the problems with these monsters. It is clear that these things are useless in cold conditions and unsuitable as an energy source for winter.
I recently read a paper that suggested that one reason why these wind farms are not producing the level of output theoretically calculated (on a per windmill basis) is due to the windmills being spaced too closely together.
I cannot remember the details but apparently as the wind passes accross one of these windmills it is either robbed of energy (the energy required to turn the windmill) and/or vortices are set up such that by the time the wind passes by the next windmill there is considerably less energy to impart into that windmill. As I say, I cannot recall the details but I seem to recall that the paper suggested that the windmills are being placed to near to each other and to optomise the output of each individual windmill they need to be placed apart by a factor of 2 in each direction; in other words each wind farm needs to cover 4 times the total area if it is to deliver anything approaching it’s theoretical output. This would greatly add to the expense and the eyesore of these farms. I guess that it is back to the design board.

Surely this whole issue is overblown . . .

How is .00000001% of the wind infrastructure failing news?
I guess it is if the site is funded by the Koch brothers…

What a wonderful monument to commemorate the collapse of cAGW.
Send a copy to Chris Huhne, UK minister for energy, and his US equivalents.

I’m failing to see the brittleness. The steel seems like it was still very maleable. It wouldn’t have deformed like that if it wasn’t still maleable, it would have just snapped off clean. The ductile/brittle transition temp for common steels these days is way, way, WAY below zero. Near liquid-nitrogen temps.
But I do get your point.
MattN<—has a materials science degree…..

Proof that one picture is worth a thousand words…
http://www.investors.com/EditorialCartoons/Cartoon.aspx?id=561634
One of the best summations of the dilemma being inflicted on us I’ve seen yet.

Is this an isolated incident (mfg QA went bad) or are all of the towers in the area down?

Trust it did not crush any wandering polar bears

I recall the early 1960s when ‘UK’ Ferrybridge ‘C’ cooling towers collapsed due to Wind
On 1 November 1965, three of the cooling towers collapsed due to vibrations in 85 mph winds.
http://wapedia.mobi/en/Ferrybridge_power_station

I wonder how many others had the same fate in that area;
Foote Creek I – 69 turbines
Foote Creek II – 3 turbines
Foote Creek III – 33 turbines
Foote Creek IV – 28 turbines
or was this just maybe a cow bumping into it too many times.

All part of the mix of reasons as to why these things are such a disaster and not a serious contributor to public electrical supply. There have actually been a significant number of failures of various types. Any idea as to how big this one was?

That bust windmill looks a bit like an upside down hockey stick.

But at least the windmill is statistically robust!

remember how Boone Pickens built all those wonderful windmills in Texas? This morning, across the state, we are being forced to sit through rolling blackouts (15 minutes at a time) because nobody predicted that the temp would drop so low this year, and that we would want to use so much power to stay warm when it did!

To those who believe in wind power – please sell everything you own (house, car, etc.) and invest the proceeds in a wind farm. Safe, reliable, cheap…should recoup your investment in no time. Right?
For the rest of us in the real world, we need to decide if we’re serious about nuclear power, since that will be one of our only alternatives for abundant, reliable power in the future.
By the way, how do you recharge your electric vehicle when the power goes out…

There are many grades of structural steel that have ductile-brittle transition temperatures below -54F. The photos indicate a possible weld failure. There are a number of heat affect zone problems that could have caused the failure. The low temperatures and high winds were only likely contributing factors.

omegaman66 says:
February 2, 2011 at 12:23 am
So build it stronger don’t see this as a big issue. There are much bigger.
======================================================
Sure, double or triple the over engineering for safety. What’s wasting a few more dollars on a known boondoggle?

…but but who dunnit? – was it windmade™?
—————————————————————————————-
Groups launch wind power product label- “WindMade”
“Electricity generated from renewable sources is often more EXPENSIVE ……..WE hope that this will create a strong element of CONSUMER PULL……said Ditlev Engel, VESTAS chief executive”
————————————————————————————–
http://af.reuters.com/article/energyOilNews/idAFLDE70G1IU20110117
Windmade is a non-profit organisation….

I’d just like to say thanks for the laughs this morning. Had to get out of my all wheel drive twice this m

Good thing coal, gas & nuke plants don’t get flattened by the wind….

Subsidized wind turbines must be cheaply built to justify their use as power generators. And therein lies the problem. Let us hope that the powers that be did not actually consider this as an asset and even engineer for its existence, so that a high repair rate would help build the green economy.

Can we imagine what a “solar farm” would look like after a damaging windstorm? Better put spoilers on the edges of the panels.

Do these giants, pictured, just lay on the ground to rot? Must be plenty of work for the maintenance staff, with all of the pickups to run out to the site for ‘eval’, then the larger truck cranes etc for removal and eventual replacement that is a seven-wonder of traffic planning stop and go citizen auto interface movement of those long long propeller blades (some need a tillerman). Tehachapi 5000 unit one such transmission failed two years ago in neutral – free spin “Turbines get out of control when the gears become disengaged and there is no way to stop them. Mechanics have to wait until the wind dies down.” State Route 58 through Tehachapi a 4 lane freeway closed for 36 hrs. Fear that the giant blade (feathering mechanism malfunction) may break off at the spindle and come cartwheeling down the hill to hit some motorist. East and West bound traffic was diverted to that original old wagon road – now paved 2-lane not much wider than a 2 track cow-path stop-go for 1 hr to travel 5 miles. How many gallons of diesel gasoline were burned on that 5 miles/36hr? Some of the turns required cars to yield to the big commercial trucks.
Charles F Brush (Ohio) built the first automatically operated wind turbine for electricity production. “Although James Blyth’s turbine was considered uneconomical in the United Kingdom electricity generation by wind turbines was more cost effective in countries with widely scattered populations” – this around 1900. And John Etheringtons book Wind Farm Scam, and what those in the electric wind industry in 19oo seemed to have discovered, must have been repudiated, look at the size of Tehacipi Farm.

Chris Wright’s observations at February 2, 2011 at 4:52 am are absolutely right. If there was any doubt as to the unsuitability of these windmills as a serious energy provider, it was dispelled in the winter 2009/10. I repeatedly monitored their performance and for a period of about 3 weeks, they never bettered 8% of their design performance and nearly always delivered no better than 1% of their designed performance! This experience should have taught the politicians that they are wholly inappropriate from an energy security poing of view. One would have thought that this would have let the politicians in 2010 to put a hold on further deployment of these windmills until issues of energy storage has been properly dealt with.
Solar probably has no place in the UK since the UK is far too North and due to the angle of incidence, the power is weak. In winter this problem is exacerbated and of course the days are short. Windpower also is unreliable. Had the UK been dependent upon these sources for more than 30% of the generating capacity, we would have had to have rationed electrity and there would have been power cuts of at least 8 hours a day. Probably longer than that since some essential services (hospitals, railway lines and the like) would have had to have been prioritised such that for domestic users power cuts would probably have had to have been 10 to 12 hours per day.
This is a serious problem since without electricity unless one has a log or coal fire, one is without heating. Gas or oil central heating wll not work without electrity (needed for electric ignition and circulating pumps). Potentially, there could have been hundreds of thousands even millions of deaths caused by the extreme cold conditions and the lack of heat. To mitigate this, there would have to have been mass evacuations from homes to schools and sports halls just so that people could be kept warm in some communal hall. Such evacuation would have been very difficult due to lack of grit and the poor condition of the roads etc.
I do not know what civil emergency plans the government has to cope with such scenarios. But one cannot have an energy policy where hundereds of thousands of people are killed due to lack of energy security even if the winter of 2009/10 was a 1 in 30 winter. As we have seen from the winter 2010/11, the 1 in 30 year winter has been directly followed by 1 in 100 year winter! There is every prospect that we shall be in for more cold winters in the coming years.
The politicians really need to analyse the true and real life delivery of energy by these wind farms, and to decide how they will cope should winter conditions of 2009/10 and/or 2010/11 be repeated.
I noted from the site referred to by Keith at February 2, 2011 at 4:06 am, that there were 71 (or may be it was 73) fatalities caused by or incidentally by these windmills. That surprised me. They are not as friendly as they may be marketed. Of course, birds have it far worse.

1. The massive wind farm I live next too does have A LOT of broken and otherwise out of service wind mills. While not a scientific survey I’d say about 1 to 2% breakdown permanently each year based on the gradual reduction of the total drop in energy production each year. And it only takes a causal look to see all the scrap metal all over the place on the grounds of the wind farm.
2. In my opinion: The windmill bird killing stories are based in environmental bogus research. Prof. Smallwood makes a nice living hyping this story. I’ve never seen him or his team surveying our wind farm. The same wind farm that is his research is founded on. And I’ve never seen a bird killed by one. And we have tons of hawks, etc. living around the wind mills. And he claims many bird strike deaths during periods of near zero wind.
3. The wind mills are beautiful. Lots of people stop and take pictures of them against the green hills this time of year. They make NO noise that you can hear from where you live. Because when the wind is blowing you have to be within 50 yards of them to hear them.
4. Wind mills are NOT a solution AT ALL for energy independence. 6 months out of the year they barely move at all. So an entire full capacity energy system would have to be built for the idle time – which is crazy expensive. Right Now: No Wind. Ironically, they are building a natural gas power station right on the edge of the wind farm. The political powers already know wind is not the answer – they just make speeches about it for their less than intelligent green voters. Do I wish wind was the answer: OF COURSE but like the scientists of the 1800’s figured out: Wind could not even compete with Whale oil.
5. One of the best roads in the USA is Old Patterson Pass road between Tracy and Livermore CA during this time of year. Absolutely awesome.

Some engineering work!?
They should have filled a wall of reinforced concrete in this thing. Not only they get huge subsidies to built those things but they also cut short on material and engineering.

richard verney says:
February 2, 2011 at 7:16 am
Chris Wright’s observations at February 2, 2011 at 4:52 am are absolutely right. If there was any doubt as to the unsuitability of these windmills as a serious energy provider, it was dispelled in the winter 2009/10. I repeatedly monitored their performance and for a period of about 3 weeks, they never bettered 8% of their design performance and nearly always delivered no better than 1% of their designed performance! This experience should have taught the politicians that they are wholly inappropriate from an energy security poing of view. One would have thought that this would have let the politicians in 2010 to put a hold on further deployment of these windmills until issues of energy storage has been properly dealt with.
Solar probably has no place in the UK since the UK is far too North and due to the angle of incidence, the power is weak. In winter this problem is exacerbated and of course the days are short. Windpower also is unreliable. Had the UK been dependent upon these sources for more than 30% of the generating capacity, we would have had to have rationed electrity and there would have been power cuts of at least 8 hours a day. Probably longer than that since some essential services (hospitals, railway lines and the like) would have had to have been prioritised such that for domestic users power cuts would probably have had to have been 10 to 12 hours per day.
This is a serious problem since without electricity unless one has a log or coal fire, one is without heating. Gas or oil central heating wll not work without electrity (needed for electric ignition and circulating pumps). Potentially, there could have been hundreds of thousands even millions of deaths caused by the extreme cold conditions and the lack of heat. To mitigate this, there would have to have been mass evacuations from homes to schools and sports halls just so that people could be kept warm in some communal hall. Such evacuation would have been very difficult due to lack of grit and the poor condition of the roads etc.
I do not know what civil emergency plans the government has to cope with such scenarios. But one cannot have an energy policy where hundereds of thousands of people are killed due to lack of energy security even if the winter of 2009/10 was a 1 in 30 winter. As we have seen from the winter 2010/11, the 1 in 30 year winter has been directly followed by 1 in 100 year winter! There is every prospect that we shall be in for more cold winters in the coming years.
The politicians really need to analyse the true and real life delivery of energy by these wind farms, and to decide how they will cope should winter conditions of 2009/10 and/or 2010/11 be repeated.
I noted from the site referred to by Keith at February 2, 2011 at 4:06 am, that there were 71 (or may be it was 73) fatalities caused by or incidentally by these windmills. That surprised me. They are not as friendly as they may be marketed. Of course, birds have it far worse.
—————————
WOW! And people accuse the AGW groups of alarmist!
It’s gone from 3 week observation of a wind farm during a quiet period in the winter to millions dying every year in the UK!

Just an observation: that breach in the column doesn’t appear to be at the point of maximum stress which I *think* is about a third of the way up the column. Further, it appears to be about chest high, and in a perfectly straight line. Could this have been sabotage? Anybody with a pickup and a battery-powered grinder could have done it, I think. I’d be looking for tire tracks.

Ed Mertin says:
February 2, 2011 at 12:25 am
Kinda of takes the edge off concerns of global hyperinflation and improving chances for world war out of the Holy lands.
Anyone check near-earth asteroid transits?

Another unfavorable facet of wind mills and farms is leaving the decaying structures in place long after they have stopped working. South Point on the big island of Hawai’i is a very sceninc and windy place and has two wind farms. One old and decaying, the other new and producing. The website below has pictures of this and some other shut down renewable energy projects. When compared to the lifetime of of coal-fired, nuke, and hydroelectic plants; solar and wind don’t seem to last as long and don’t seem to require clean-up.
http://webecoist.com/2009/05/04/10-abandoned-renewable-energy-plants/

“MattN says:
February 2, 2011 at 3:51 am
I’m failing to see the brittleness. The steel seems like it was still very maleable. It wouldn’t have deformed like that if it wasn’t still maleable, it would have just snapped off clean. The ductile/brittle transition temp for common steels these days is way, way, WAY below zero. Near liquid-nitrogen temps.
But I do get your point.
MattN<—has a materials science degree….."
Matt: Second the concept. Not really NDT of -200 F however, more like -20 to -40 F for good quality structural steel. (More towards -20 F…but sometimes as high has 0 F.
As you noted this is a BUCKLING FAILURE. Which translates to one thing, STRUCTURAL OVERLOAD.
The other translation is: Not designed to handle all potential weather conditions. One of the problems here is "feathering"the blades for high winds. You can't just lock the turbine, you have to "feather" so that you minimize the cross sectional area.
If this was done, then the DESIGN was not adequate for the cantilivered load.
That's a design/enviromental interface problem. Since the ASME has WIND and SEISMIC criteria for various zones for DISTILLATION TOWERS, (which are equally high..) and we haven't had a lot of toppled distillation towers of the last 60 years…(ASME B&PV Code, Section VIII, non-fired pressure vessels), one has to wonder about this design criteria.
If the blades were LOCKED and NOT FEATHERED or if the turbine was running and went into "overspeed" and did not lock/feather…this is an operational problem.
YES, it does not give you a multi million $ contamination problem, as an accident at a nuclear plant (score – one in the US, Three Miles Island). However, if you are into some marginal financing, losing your $2,000,000 wind turbine, could make you "hurt", until you go to the public trough to pay for it.
Max

Interestingly this lunchtime a colleague of mine at work said that he knew of a wind turbine snapping in high winds on Orkney (an island off the north coast of Scotland, a location of the UK where the government hope to build lots of wind turbines because the conditions are suppossed to be favourable…).
So someone commented along the lines of Omegaman66 below:
omegaman66 says:
February 2, 2011 at 12:23 am
So build it stronger don’t see this as a big issue. There are much bigger.
The only problem was, went my engineer colleague, building them stronger, or even with a system which allowed the turbine to be lowered in high winds, would increase the cost of the turbine exponentially…. Making wind power even less competitive with good old fossil fuel power generation systems.

I was surprised by the number of wind-power-related fatalities but, reading about them made me hearken back to a comment by Dr. Petr Beckman 35 years ago. He said that the erection of wind (and rooftop solar) instalations would lead to “carnage”. Prescient.

Tom:
…if you’re going to throw out wind power because a turbine fell over due to (likely) a manufacturing problem then you should also throw out nuclear power because there have been radiation leaks
brad says:
February 2, 2011 at 3:31 am
Wow, one wing turbine feel over? What huge news. WUWT claimed one well exploding in the Gulf as minor, and that was much biggger than this, WUWT is all for nukes even after Chrnobyl and 3 Mile Island!
This fair and balanced reporting is just great, and adds lots of cred to this site, it realy does!
Of course the essential background condition is that nuclear and “fossil fuel” work, and we’ve also known for a while now that wind doesn’t. You guys should ask yourselves why you’ve missed this critical difference.

http://www.spaceandscience.net/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/ssrcresearchreport1-2010.doc

Electronic problem . Failure to automaticly feather the prop. aerodinamics did the rest.
If this turbine was in a farm of 20 ,they lost 5% of production.

Question: does the poster know if this was a recent collapse? A tower collapsed in the Arlington area on Thanksgiving Day. Is this a photograph of that event or a second one?

I too am surprised that the point of failure is so low to the ground. Would a gearbox seizure produce sufficient torque at that point to topple the tower or would it be higher up?
Are wind turbines (or as I call them Money Spinners) built with earthquake protection?
Are the blades gunshot-proof? “Road signs are boring, bet you can’t hit one of the blades of that”? Do they do that in Wyoming? Is the whole shooting at roadsigns thing a Hollywood myth?
Inquiring Brits want to know!

SteveE says: It’s gone from 3 week observation of a wind farm during a quiet period in the winter to millions dying every year in the UK!
I don’t know where SteveE got the “millions” from. But it only takes a few days of no heating to kill off thousands of vulnerable (very old and very young) people.
Windturbines frequently fail to produce any electricity on the coldest days of winter as these occur predominantly during windless anticyclonic periods.
Here in the UK we have a lunatic (Chris Huhne) in charge of energy policy.
In ten to twelve years time several coal-fired power stations will have been closed down under EC emissions regulations, and most of our nuclear installations will have come to the end of their lives. These plants currently supply 40 per cent of our needs.
If we can hope to build enough wind turbines to provide, say, 25 per cent of our electricity (10 times the current proportion needing at least 10,000 turbines) the cost will be well over £80 billion, plus another £40 billion to connect them up to the grid. Even then we we will still have a generating shortfall of 40% during periods of extreme cold such as those of last December, which will mean power cuts on a scale never before experienced in this country! All central heating systems require mains electricity to function, so there will be thousands if not tens of thousands of deaths from hypothermia. Yet for £30 billion we could have ten clean modern super efficient nuclear power stations.

No-one has mentioned ice on the blades. This can cause imbalance in the rotor due to uneven shedding of the ice which would certainly be enough to cause high oscillatory loads at the hub.
Freezing rain would be as disastrous for windmills as it is for aircraft and helicopters. Are windmills designed to cope with this?

I’m sure oil drilling rigs have also failed due to weather. Especially offshore rigs due to waves, hurricanes, et cetera. And there must have been a few lightning strikes that set the oil on fire…

SteveE at February 2, 2011 at 8:50 am suggests that I am exagerating the consences of being dependent upon windpower for 30% or more of total electricity generation. As noted, I monitored the daily generation of windfarms in December 2009 and January 2010. For a period of 3 weeks these windfarms were producing no more than 8% of their rated output and in the main nearer only 1% to 3%. Probably during this period, they produced little if any net contribution to the national grid given that power is required to heat and turn the rotors when there is no wind and extreme cold. If, in 2009/10, the UK had been reliant for 30% of its energy needs on windpower, we would have had around a 30% shortfall in energy leading to extreme power rationing. In fact, for the better part of a 6 week period except for a few odd days here and there, they were not generating anything remotely approaching their designed criteria but I am only focusing on the 3 week spell when we had a blocking high weather front sitting almost directly over the UK..
According to figures compiled by the Office of National Statistics, in the winter of 2008/9 there were some 36,700 more deaths compared to summer months and 12,000 more deaths than the winter average for the previous decade. This was due to the cold weather conditions encountered during the winter of 2008/9 and in particular old people being unable to properly heat their homes (due to the expense of fuel). See for example:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1230650/Fuel-firms-facing-criticism-number-winter-deaths-reaches-highest-level-decade.html
The fact is that in the UK, we have an aging population and much poor quality housing stock. A lot of homes are old, draughty, damp and not well insulated. Old people are particularly vulnerable especially to cold conditions which have a lot of knock on effects. I am not talking merely about hypothermia but point out that many illnesses are exacerbated by the cold, and of course these cold conditions can lead directly to flu and pneumonia which are huge killers in old people.
In the UK we have for some time had an extremely poor record with respect to winter deaths. See for example: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/1754561.stm wherein it is observed that the UK has the worst record in Europe for winter deaths. This is no doubt partly due to the dampness of our climate and the poor quality of housing stock and probably also the poverty of old people.
The winter of 2008/9 was a cold winter but there were no power cuts and yet it led to an additional 12,000 deaths (over and above the 1998/2007 winter average). Now imagine the situation where we have equally or more cold conditions and homes are without electricity and heating for say 8 to 10 hours a day for a continuous period of 3 weeks (or slightly more). It is easy to see how that figure of an extra 12,000 deaths would sky rocket. The majority of old people may cope with power cuts for 2 or 3 days but not for a continuous period of 21 or more days. This would have a drastic effect on their health. I do not consider that it is any exaggeration to say that in these circumstances, potentially, we are talking about hundreds of thousands of extra deaths.
You may argue that people in the past survived without electricity. Well that is true but no doubt mortality rates (as a percentage) were high 80 to 100 years ago. One problem is that conditions are very different to say the 1930s and 40s. In this period, houses were heated by coal and this was delivered direct to the door. Indeed, many houses had cellars which contained coal bunkers (nowadays these cellars have been converted into basement flats). Accordingly, to get some coal often one only had to venture down the stairs to the cellar. People no longer live like this. Indeed in many homes the fire places have been removed or boarded up. More than 99% of homes are reliant upon electricity for heating because electricity is required to run all forms of central heating. The reality is that nowadays, old people would not be well prepared for a cold winter and would not be able to withstand the effects of deep power cuts for prolonged periods.
Wind power is simply incapable of providing energy security. This is blatantly obvious and this hair brained scheme should be dropped forthwith. The UK like all other countries requires reliable energy produced as cheaply as possible.

It is ironic that a man-made device designed solely to harvest the power of the wind cannot stand up to the wind. Meanwhile, down in Texas, home to the largest collection of wind turbines in all 50 States, there are rolling blackouts, because there isn’t enough power. It’s laughable.
Get the facts on this unreliable, undispatchable, unsustainable source of power at
http://www.windpowerfraud.com.

We’ve had at least two rolling blackouts here in Texas today. The grid administrator, ERCOT, has declared a power emergency, citing reduced generation capacity due to the cold weather. Something about some coal plants having water main breaks. Ha! I suspect the wind turbines in West Texas that almost caused us havoc last summer probably went haywire with the high winds that have been blowing the last two days. In any event, the fact that the Federal government has been hampering the construction of new electrical generation facilities (nuclear and coal) is my opinion part of the reason for today’s blackouts. And, I fear, more will be on the way in the future.
This is a matter I will look into further as things get back to normal.

@John Kewhr says:

Gee.. I wonder what type of power would be effective for a long time and work even in bad weather…

I nominate the Chinese and their Thorium MSR reactors.

I’m sure no-one will read this, but I have to correct you anyways. 2 coal power plants in Texas were taken out in the weather today causing rolling blackouts. Why is the weather to blame you ask? Frozen pipes. Not one, but 2 power sources. Granted they weren’t *destroyed* but they were rendered unusable for long enough to cause huge amounts of trouble statewide.

Southern California Edison has selected 250 MW worth of solar bids from companies able to produce solar electricity for 20 years for less money annually than the 20 year levelized cost of energy of a combined-cycle natural gas turbine power plant.
Southern California Edison buys 20 years of Solar for less than the levelized cost of nat gas:
http://cleantechnica.com/2011/02/01/sce-buys-20-years-of-solar-power-for-less-than-natural-gas/
They could have purchased ten times as much if they’d wished.
We seem to be looking at something under $0.11 kwh.

“Combine cold temperatures that make steel brittle along with gusty winds, and you have a Titanic recipe for disaster. For those that will argue that I’m being unfair to the promise of wind power, I welcome you to provide photos of any power plant in the USA that has been collapsed due to weather. Downed power poles sure, but power sources?”
Yeah, you are being unfair to wind’s potential. The first link is a partial collapse of a power plant in the USA during a flood. I believe it was a fuel oil powered plant. Wind turbines could potentially be resistant to flood damage, with proper design.
http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~neredwil/35flood.htm
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/02/100226-water-energy-climate-change-dams-nuclear/
Plus, for a fair comparison, one would include the entire power source stream from extraction to power production. Over the years, floods have put coal mines out of commission for stretches at a time. I’m sure natural gas and oil drilling platforms have been demolished by inclement weather in the past. I’m sure that coal barges and trains have been disrupted by inclement weather, as well as natural gas and oil pipelines. These supply disruptions are mitigated by having reserves available within the supply chain. In the same way, renewable energy reserves can be utilized via a well-connected grid and pumped storage technologies. Where one turbine or even a dozen fall, they can be supplanted with excess capacity from another point in the grid while repairs are made. Some of this redundancy is built into the grid already. For example, all power plants need maintenance or experience failures, and when one is down, the others fill in the gaps.
In addition, fossil fuel extraction and power production can experience large-scale failures and risks. Wind power failures are generally localized.
http://www.usmra.com/saxsewell/historical.htm
http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/02/07/us-energy-explosion-idUSTRE61619Q20100207
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly_ash_slurry_spill
Plus there are the public health concerns, earthquake damage, water supply usage, inequitable distributions of resources, excessive gov’t subsidies, environmental concerns and the fact that the resources won’t last forever.
Hey, I could go on, but the point is that different power sources have strengths and weaknesses. Since fossil fuel power plants are housed in buildings, they can be hardened to withstand heavy weather. Wind turbine towers are structures that are a bit more susceptible to heavy winds. Engineers can figure out how to deal with harsh environmental extremes. I’m sure somebody has learned from this particular turbine failure experience.
So, fossil fuels have gotten us this far, and they have done great things for people. Nevertheless, they won’t last forever. Why not get some investment and experience going with extracting and using renewables now so people don’t have to worry about digging around frantically for resources by 2150 (or whenever fossil fuel reserves run low)?
These are fair and comprehensive analyses of wind power, with references to experts.
http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy08osti/41869.pdf

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WO3V2uXTM6k

Coach Springer says:
February 2, 2011 at 8:26 am
“A Question: It taks a subsidy to erect a wind turbine. When it fails, does it take a subsidy to replace it? I’m thinking yes, this creates a corporate/government entitlement program in pursuit of a utopian fantasy.”
All electrical generation gets subsidized to encourage growth in total capacity. Typically it’s in the form of tax incentives. Wind subsidies in the US are much smaller than nuclear subsidies and nuclear is much smaller than ethanol subsidies although ethanol and electricity aren’t really in the same category. Ethanol subsidies are the only ones ill-considered and significant in size AFAIC. Total state of Texas subsidies given to wind generation is less than $3 million. Agricultural subsidies are closer to $3 billion as a point of comparison. A larger source of “green” sourced electrical subsidies is voluntary contributions by consumers. You can choose to purchase “green” electricity from your electric company in Texas and pay modest premium for it. There’s more demand for green electricity than there is green electricity to be sold so consumers wanting to go green still end up purchasing non-green when the green source is exhausted.
http://www.window.state.tx.us/specialrpt/energy/subsidies/

Watch out for more failures when it starts to warm up. I spent 8 years in western Nebraska and Eastern Wyoming, most of it out doors. Despite the assurances of several engineers in the posts above, temperature could have been a factor. I remember a cold stretch of winter in Scottsbluff, NE in the early 70’s. We went from 12/29/73-1/12/74 with the temperature never rising above freezing and then dropping below zero each night. When the cold snap broke, the temperature shot up +/- 40 degrees in less than an hour as the chinook winds blew in. The twenty mile an hour winds, coupled with the rapid rise in temperature caused several structural failures in the region. These included stoplight horizontal arms and at least one partially constructed steel building. Since the wind wasn’t strong enough to account for the failures, there must have been a temperature component.

This should be a lesson to all those thinking about cashing in on the tax incentivized effort to replace wood burning stoves with anything else. Keep the wood burning stove. Eventually you will need it again. A high quality wood stove is the only heat source that allows you to survive off the guvmnt grid when it shuts down, and stay warm enough during frigid cold weather. It also allows you to cook food and boil water. If you don’t have this capacity, you are a sitting duck at best, cannon fodder at worst.

Kansas has a lot of wind and pays 6 cents / kwh. That is cheap because they have nuclear and coal. If they build may more turbines for free wind, the price will double quickly.

Does anyone have any idea of the effect of precession on wind generators?
From my (long-ago) gyroscope theory, there could be a considerable twisting torque being applied to the towers causing them to buckle in high winds if blade rotation is not stopped in time.
Although they do not appear to have high RPMs, the length of the blades means the tips are traveling at a high speed. Even attempting to turn a hand-held, spinning bicycle wheel (ie, small and slow speed) can demonstrate the torques involved.

V Martin says:
February 2, 2011 at 8:17 pm
http://www.windaction.org/pictures/30961
Wait a minute… it would appear that there is something amiss with this story. The above link with a picture that looks exactly like the failed tower has a date on it of Nov 25, 2010. So much for any discussion of what the temperature was in February, 2011 and what it might have had to do with the failure…. This thing has been laying there dead for a while.
Quick gooogle check shows the conditions in Arlington, WY on 25.11.10 as cold and windy, as per usual for that area. Not as cold as the most recent conditions, but same ballpark. Does it really matter that it happened 2 months ago? Judging from some of the comments here, sounds like it’s not all that unusual.
That being said, until I see a whole line of them blown over, I don’t see any irony here at all.

My birds have twittered. “At least that windmill is not killing our revelent others.

Freddy T says:
February 2, 2011 at 12:36 pm

I’m sure oil drilling rigs have also failed due to weather. Especially offshore rigs due to waves, hurricanes, et cetera. And there must have been a few lightning strikes that set the oil on fire…

It is worthwhile to replace an oil drilling rig because of the plentiful and cheap energy produced. Not so with a bird/bat grinder.
Also an oil rig is replaced with private funding; not so with bird/bat grinder.

To Patrick Davis at 12.50 am, I believe you will find that the TITANIC was built of wrought iron plate, not steel, but certainly all riveted construction. The quality of the iron was indeed found to be inferior in later testing whereupon it shattered in impact tests relatively easily compared to a better quality iron. I cannot speak about the rivets though they would almost certainly have been iron also. Had the vessel been built with its watertight bulkheads extended upwards through the decks, it may well have survived. But as each bulkhead section filled and overflowed into the next, the chain reaction spelt doom.
There have been many boats built of Lowmoor Iron forged in the Midland shires and many still survive, some are Ice boats on the canal, and two I know of in particular were built pre-1870; LAPLANDER & BALTIC. Strong stuff when poured correctly and very corrosion resistant. I believe TITANIC’s sister ship was of far better quality.
To Greg Holmes at 01.14 am. This is not a shame, it is a disaster. The disaster is that our UK (and elsewhere) governments have launched us into excruciatingly expensive power sources that do not – cannot – meet energy demands when required. The performance of these catastrophic monsters marring the landscape, are creating vast areas of chemical wastelands in the country of origin from whence some vital rare earth is required for the construction of their generator magnets – namely neodymium from China: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1350811/In-China-true-cost-Britains-clean-green-wind-power-experiment-Pollution-disastrous-scale.html
When the wind does not blow, these huge turbines need to be driven round so as to prevent sagging of mainshaft components. When the temperature drops and ice forms, the blades need to be heated to prevent imbalance and major failure. This causes them to be CONSUMERS of power under such circumstances. The output from all of the UK’s wind turbines rarely gets higher than 6% of total demand, and during the coldest periods recently experienced, dropped to below 1%. Current power output by generation type can be monitored at n.e.t.a. here: http://www.bmreports.com/bsp/bsp.php#chartelement
It should also be noted that due to the unsteady reliability of the wind to blow at the right speed at the right times, conventional power stations will need to be fired and running to balance all output to demand as required. No savings there, none anywhere – wind powered electricity alone will cost not just money – but lives. As an additional power source – they are a financial drain on the consumer.
As machines of awesome beauty, they may be seen by some. But the cost and disruption to the landscape has to embody the thousands of tons of concrete poured for their bases, miles of access roads to their sites, and the now established damage to wild bird life they cause.
We no longer grind corn into flour using wind. If such was an efficient device to do so, would the land not be covered by corn grinding windmills? At least one can live in such ancient structures. (Legs and health permitting).

Eric N. WY says:
February 2, 2011 at 10:01 pm Says…
Does it really matter that it happened 2 months ago?
Well, when you have almost 200 posts with many theorizing about the failure and basing them on the misinformation of the temperatures that existed at the time, yes. And by the way, the other link didn’t actually say when the failure occurred… it could be much older than two months. It’s good to have the right information and hopefully somebody who knows with certainty will post it here.
Don Shaw says:
February 2, 2011 at 10:08 pm says…
Bottom line: a proper failure analysis/investigation must be performed to determine the cause of failure including a metallurgical inspection of the fracture surface under a microscope, testing of material specimens for strength and toughness, and advanced stress analysis. It is irresponsible not to undertake the investigation and publish the results for public consumption and to correct any deficiencies in other structures.
I agree with this sentiment exactly… since the public has an interest in this issue (both with the security of supply and safety since failed parts could leave the property), the public should have complete unfettered access to the results.
Here’s my question… Where on earth are the professional engineers societies with respect to these failures? Surely there is enough of a history of failures to warrant the creation of a new set of standards that at least relates separation distances to height of towers (as well as establishing other important engineering criteria) etc. In my opinion, the minimum distance from the tall ones to a property line should be 5 miles.

You leverage a collapsed steel wind tower with a power plant, they are vastly different in scope and design. the problem has nothing to do with wind power and everything to do with our crappy american design and engineering systems.

It looks like the turbine fell on top of something. Here’s an enhanced version of that picture that shows it better: http://i.imgur.com/rTo3F.jpg

Yes, very good one Arthur! Thanks for the laugh.

Arthur, that was baaaad!

Without massive federal subsidies, wind does not work. Only thing worse is solar. I with a group of others tried to put a wind deal together, and the only thing that made it remotely interesting is that the power company offered to buy power from us at $.09 kilowatt. They sell it for about $.14 a kilowatt. It was marginal at best at this price considering the cost an installation, AND the huge maintenance cost of a turbine. And the only reason that it was .09, was that the state mandated a certain percentage of power come from “green” technology. Otherwise the power company was paying $.03 per Kilowatt from normal power plants. Well friends and neighbors, guess who gets to pay for that good green wind power. Look at your electric bill, just another form of government folly and tax.