Trent Brome writes on his Facebook page:
Arlington, WY – avg annual wind speed of 31mph, gusts above 110mph, seems like a great place for a wind turbine ….right?
Photos from Feb 1, 2011 as the cold air mass that formed Snowzilla barreled through. The wind chill in the area from yesterday was extreme, -54F !!
0453 AM EXTR WIND CHILL PUMPKIN VINE 41.05N 105.46W 02/01/2011 M-54.00 F ALBANY WY DEPT OF HIGHWAYS
A new record low was set in Cheyenne:
RECORD EVENT REPORT NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE CHEYENNE WY 523 PM MST TUE FEB 01 2011 ...RECORD DAILY LOW HIGH SET AT CHEYENNE WYOMING... A RECORD DAILY LOW HIGH WAS SET TODAY AT CHEYENNE WYOMING. THE OLD RECORD WAS MINUS 5 SET IN 1899. THE NEW RECORD LOW HIGH IS MINUS 9.
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?
h/t to Eric Nielsen for the photo
=============================================================
UPDATE: While the Facebook page source of these photos shows them dated yesterday, Feb 1st, it appears the event actually happened November 25th. A similar photo here:
http://www.windaction.org/pictures/30961
The same author, Trent Brome, submitted them. It is unfortunate he did not make note of the correct date on his facebook page, and given a strong storm had just passed, I had no reason to expect otherwise. I apologize for not checking further. Thanks to V Marti for pointing out the other website link above. – Anthony
so Brad,
you are right, the spill was much bigger … we have now stopped nearly all drilling for oil in the gulf and on the east coast of the US … we are all paying the price at the pump for not following the science …
really, the Koch brothers ??? maybe you didn’t notice but the old “funded by big oil” meme has lost its punch …
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.
“Painting this as a general problem with wind power is frankly pretty childish. That it is a problem is self-evident, but 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. I know which I’d rather live near! But of course we don’t throw out either; we learn from our mistakes. At least with wind the cleanup is quick and cheap.”
The migraine studies bother me, as I do get migraines at times, and for what its worth, I would rather not take the chance on that. I would much rather have a nuclear plant next door to me.
In fact, I find nuclear power safer then being in a Kennedy car. More people have died in Kennedy cars then due to nuclear power in the US. Zero for nuclear power. Just a cheap joke really…but you get the point. And for the record, there are numerous accounts of failure on these monstrosities, they only produce 1/3 of their listed power under GOOD conditions, they cost too much money to generate the same power as nuclear, and above all else they kill birds and cause migraines. And of course over their life-times, the power they generate pumps more CO2 into the atmosphere then coal. This is because their assembly is so expensive in GHG’s that its just laughable to call this “green.”
You seriously can not call yourself an environmentalist and still like wind power…its just not compatible in any way except that its what Al Gore (others) said was a good thing. Kind of like the biofuels episode…it is another green mistake that will be attempted to be forgotten as we continue on and the problems finally begin surfacing from the un-researched green agenda. Keep talking….reality can not be escaped, but if you want to live with dead birds and migraines, feel free, just don’t ask me to pay for the subsidies.
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.
After looking at the pictures the only thing missing is the lit cigarette after having made love to Gaia.
“Wind turbines make bat lungs explode”;
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14593
and clip the wings and heads of birds:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtgBWNKwBkE&feature=related
Wind power, as currently harvested, is not “green” energy…
“Combine cold temperatures that make steel brittle along with gusty winds, and you have a Titanic recipe for disaster. ”
The structural failure shown does not appear to be a brittle fracture. The main mast shows massive plastic deformation (it is buckled and bent over horizontally), indicating ductile performance of the mast material and structural loads exceeding the material tensile strength. There is a tear (fracture) visible on the tension side of the failure but it does not extend around the majority of the diameter, which is more consistent with ductile rather than brittle fracture also.
Only a macro and microscopic examination of the fracture surfaces could confirm this hypothesis, but from the evidence available, this is a ductile failure. Nothing visible indicates brittle failure.
Nor is it comparable to the Titanic. The failed cantilevered beam structure in this case appears to be deliberately anchored to the ‘iceberg’! };>)
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.
Anyone care to take a wild guess about the number of wind turbines that have castrophically failed versus the number that have not had a problem?
This is sort of like seeing pictures of homes destroyed by tornadoes or airliners that have crashed and burned. Those are newsworthy because they are rare. You don’t see headlines featuring homes that have not been destroyed by tornadoes or airliners that have not crashed. We all know that the number of homes that have never been destroyed by tornadoes and the number of airliners that have never crashed are in vastly greater number. Wind turbines that have failed versus those that haven’t failed are just like that.
That said, wind turbines are a marginal niche. Think of them like hydro-power. They’re okay in places but the number of places where they can be installed and operated economically is very restricted. Hydropower is largely fully exploited and the cost of creating additional water impoundments is too expensive as fairly compensating land owers and homeowners for land and homes that must be abandoned.
Don’t lose any sleep over wind turbines. What few locations are suitable will be utilized and when those locations are fully exploited it’ll become just like hydro-power installations only I don’t expect wind farms to ever overtake hydro-generation in the amount of power it contributes to the grid.
Electricity isn’t the most pressing problem for the U.S. in any case. Liquid fuels refined from crude oil is the big problem. OPEC has us by the cajones and they can squeeze whenever they want as hard as they want. We need a new source of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel. That won’t come from wind power, nuclear power, hydro-power, solar photo-voltaic, solar thermal, or turning cornstalks into ethanol. It can only come from turning sunlight and CO2 directly into liquid fuel by genetically engineered bacteria. There is already a corporation which obtained its first patent in the middle of last year on a photo-synthetic bacteria which uses municipal wastewater, CO2, and sunlight to directly produce diesel fuel. Not biodiesel but regular diesel. The pilot plant is being built in Leander, Texas about 20 miles from where I live and is located right next to Leander’s waste water treatment plant. This is great news because Leander has been fighting to get permission to dump their treated waste water, which still carries a high phosphorus nutrient load, into the Highland Lakes which are a string of impoundments of the Colorado River (not the same river as the one that flows through California and Nevada). The high nutrient load causes algae blooms and other unwanted damaging to our pristine lakes. So far the “environmentalists” have succeeded in keeping out additional municipal waste water discharges – the old grandfathered discharge permits still remain. The engineered organisms (cyanobacteria a.k.a. blue algae) being used to generate biofuels love that high nutrient wastewater. It’s a match made in heaven. Using nothing but sunlight, wastewater, and a few additional nutrients the pilot biofuel plant being built is expected to produce up to 30,000 gallons of diesel per acre annually at a price point equivalent to $30/bbl oil. Biofuels made by genetically engineered organisms in this manner should exert enough price pressure on traditional crude oil to drive the price back down to $30/bbl and keep it there. As the synthetic biology production improves through increasingly better engineered organisms, economy of scale, and refinement of processes it should drive crude oil price back down into the $15/bbl range and the price of a gallon of gasoline back under a dollar again.
Check out the company. I’m very excited by it. I’d invest in it if I could but it’s still privately held. The IPO should be spectacular when it happens. I’d like to get a job at the pilot plant just to be a part of the next big technological revolution. I have a fair amount of experience in process control and factory automation which might be enough to get me on in a technical capacity helping improve the processes at the plant and keeping things running smoothly.
http://www.jouleunlimited.com/
“SteveE says:
February 2, 2011 at 5:58 am”
Unless you are like my wife, who appears to have the ability to fall to sleep during an air raid, I beg to differ. Having lived within sight of “billowing colling towers” and the sight and noise of “wind farms”, I know which I prefer. I also know which will provide reliable baseload power when needed.
Question does this type of failure occur with vertical type wind turbines?
Who cares! The repair monies are allocated from a separate budget!!
What is important is how much power was generated moments before the failure.
That power generation amount will be used to justify new windmills. It also proves that wind-power is fantastic…
Cheap Chinese steel. Cheap Chinese cement. Cheap Chinese gearboxes.
No wonder they fall over. Our local windfarm that we have in NE Oregon
was down for most of a week-and it happens frequently, and we are cold
here. 13F. I’d trade these things for a little nuke at the edge of town…
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.
Sarcasm on. Right now wind is giving the UK 3% of its electricity. If I switch on my 1 Kw halogen heater, could I cause a brown out? Sarcasm off.
http://www.bmreports.com/bsp/bsp_home.htm
Keith’s link should be kept current.
http://www.caithnesswindfarms.co.uk/accidents.pdf
Phillip Bratby says: February 2, 2011 at 12:35 am
That’s disturbing. I used to live in Caithness. My wife was stationed at the small US Naval Communication Station by Thurso. I don’t want to envision that beautiful countryside blemished with these bird killers.
@BenFromMO:
Well, that’s a new one on me. Looks remarkably similar to mobile phones causing cancer to me, ie ‘research’. Haven’t looked at the details, though.
As for your other, er, ‘claims’ – bird mortality? Hmmm. I’ve spent a lot of time on wind farms, and never actually seen a dead bird. The only research I’ve seen done on it came out at something like two birds killed per turbine per year – hardly a bird-shredder compared to, say, the average domestic window; they kill upwards of 100m birds a year in the US! Quick, ban them! Hmmm.
Wind turbines are well known for producing around 1/3 of their rated power on average (I assume rated is what you mean by ‘listed’). This is known as the capacity factor, and I’m not sure why you’re upset about it? Unless you think we should be surprised that the wind doesn’t always blow at the same speed. That’s in average conditions, by the way; of course in good conditions they operate at their rated output.
As for the claim that they have worse CO2 output than coal… erm… well… to be polite, can you cite a source for that? An average windmill being built today will generate the same energy as around 9000t of oil. If you really think that much energy goes into building one, your grasp of scale could use some work. (Assuming 2MW turbine, 30% capacity factor, 20 year life).
Anyhow, I don’t call myself and environmentalist, I call myself an engineer. There are undeniable problems with wind; this brand of hysterics isn’t helping solve them.
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.
brad says:
February 2, 2011 at 3:32 am
How is .00000001% of the wind infrastructure failing news?
————————————————————
You’re saying that there are 100 million wind turbines, and only one has suffered a catastrpophic failure? That sounds absurd. The internet is littered with images of these pieces of junk crashing and burning, and there aren’t 100 million that ever existed.
Simply stating that this “one failure” is what is stupid. For example,If an automobile completely fell apart into a heap of twisted metal during ordinary operating conditions all of that model of car would be pulled from the roads immediately. Also since wind turbines are at absolute best suspect in terms of electrical generation performance. They are going to be subject to greater criticism when they start physically collapsing.
Wind Turbines; unsafe and underachieving at any speed. Somehow I don’t think that Ralph Nader is going to mount a campaign to get them banned.
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!
Seamus Dubh says: February 2, 2011 at 7:44 am
“Question does this type of failure occur with vertical type wind turbines?”
Seamus, in general terms, vertical axis wind turbines are less reliable than horizontal ones because a horizontal axis windmill always (almost) has the wind coming from the same direction whereas as a vertical axis windmill turns around the wind comes first from the front, then side, then back then side, resulting in a continuous back-forward stressing of the blades.
However, it’s not exactly comparing apples with apples as vertical axis windmills have a very short tower if any. Moreover, with very big windmills, the shear size becomes a major obstacle as the force of gravity results in a side-to-side stress.
More than likely the reason this windmill failed was because the brakes failed in high winds. A static windmill has fairly low wind resistance, but start turning the blades and there is an order of magnitude more stress – so the usual strategy is to stop the windmill dead in high winds … but if the brakes fail and it keeps turning you get these Katherine wheels, runaway rotation which eventually ends in some part of the blade going resulting a an unbalanced blade and these forces bend the tower.
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.
Structural failure in wind turbine towers is not unusual.
The characteristics of the loads imposed on the tower are not well defined at all. IME, it’s very difficult to get any useful information about the quasi-static and dynamic wind loading at the tower top; especially when one takes into account the turbine blade passing the tower. Structures tend to be built either very conservatively (expensive) or on a suck-it-and-see basis, taking into account only the quasi-static loads.
There aren’t just lateral loads. The generator provides a torque reaction when generating; which fluctuates as each blade passes the tower. That torque goes through the tower as a bending moment at right angles to the principal bending moment due to the quasi-static wind load.
The situation is exacerbated under heavy winds because the tower deflects and the weight of the massive generator and turbine blades becomes more eccentric. One doesn’t need to look to Euler buckling in the column … an analysis of the eccentric loads is equivalent in practice.
The very-thin shell structures of many wind turbines are a result of trying to keep the tower as stiff as possible, to minimise deflection for a relatively small load. Unfortunately, it seems that the dynamic oscillating load of the turbine can excite modal vibrations in the shell which, when out of phase with the predominant bending moment, result in local buckling (and collapse) as the “flow” of loads becomes excessively eccentric to the material of the thin shell.
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?
I went up to Arlington Wyo. a little over a year ago to get pictures of the wind farm. It is an impressive string of wind projects. That whole I-80 corridor is studded with similar wind farms. Those wind turbine towers are a lot bigger than they look without anything nearby to give scale. At the base you can just make out the access door which looks like a ship board hatch on the left side of the base just below the buckle.
Not surprised they blew one down, I expect others will come down over time as the towers age and fatigue. All you need is winds that gust in resonance with the towers natural oscillation cycle and odds are it will buckle and fail.
Larry