This seems like a candidate for the FAIL blog, hence my caption.
Here’s the story:
“We can’t control the weather,” Julie Vitek said in an interview from company headquarters in Houston, Texas. “We’re looking to see if we can cope with it more effectively, through the testing of a couple of techniques.”
She says the conditions in northern New Brunswick have wreaked havoc on the wind farm this winter.
“For us, cold and dry weather is good and that’s what’s typical in the region. Cold and wet weather can be a problem without any warmer days to prompt thawing, which has been the case this year.
“This weather pattern has been particularly challenging.”
Full article here
h/t to a whole bunch of WUWT readers, “TomRude” being the first.
What do you mean fail?! It’s working! The windmills are helping to cool the planet!
I remember reading, years ago, about a coal plant that had been shutdown because the pile where coal was staged between delivery and use had been frozen solid by wet, cold weather.
Solar doesn’t work very well when it’s cloudy, and dust has to be cleaned off of the concentrators/solar cells.
Wind power also requires wind be within a range of speeds, too much wind is as bad as to little wind.
About the only three generation methods I can think of that can be weather proofed, are gas, geothermal, and nuclear.
This is what happens when contracts for construction are awarded based on politics and government policies rather than engineering and realistic performance analysies.
Wind-thrbines work best outdoors, not in government offices!
Floyd d. Young.
Just think of all the wasted man hours and money blown on these green statues to ignorance.
Can you imagine how well our economy would be doing if windmills were oil wells in ANWR?
And oil wells don’t kill birds, windmills do.
People in N.B. should be hopping mad. Climatologists tell us they knew all along that the warming arctic causes cold and snow, but they never shared this with us until…..well, until after all of the cold and snow. Had they told our friends in N.B. before they installed the pinwheels that they would most likely freeze up because of the hot, then they may have installed a different energy generation scheme.
Read the whole article.
Durability seems to be a challenge for wind turbines.
While in Ireland last year, I noticed a number of them built on coastal headlands.
None were turning and the locals said they had broken down fairly soon after installation.
Given the high installation cost per KW, this is very uneconomic.
Last I heard, wind power costs 1.20/kwh. Nuclear plant power costs about three cents/kilowatt hour. Coal, maybe four or five. These insane windmills are greatly beloved by the Chinese. They don’t use them, but they make and sell them to us. They take the money they make selling windmills to saps and build liquid thorium (atomic) reactors so they can utterly destroy any country whose manufacturing depends on more expensive wind power. A frequent topic on catholicfundamentalism.com is wondering what percentage of enviro budgets are provided by China and OPEC.
Just read the whole article. It just gets worse.
“But with energy market prices changing constantly, she says there’s no way to know if NB Power is paying more or less for replacement power.
“It can be more expensive. It can also be cheaper,” she says, but fluctuations in production at other sites can make up the difference.”
LOL! With management like this, who needs management?
“Despite running into problems in consecutive winters, Morton says NB Power doesn’t have concerns about the reliability of the supply from the Caribou Mountain site.”
How do you spell ‘denial’?
“David Coon, executive director of the Conservation Council of New Brunswick, says winter tends to bring higher winds to the province, which would push wind farms to produce more power.
He says the problems at Caribou Mountain are confusing, as other projects in cold climates haven’t had similar ice issues.”
Poor Coon. He’s confused. He thinks all “cold” climates are the same, even, presumably, the warmcold ones.
“can’t control the weather”?
Shazaam! They must not be climate alarmists then!
I guess the wind “farmers” are calling it rotten ice. ;->
Now that we know global warming causes it to get colder and snow more….
…what good are these things now
Mike wrote “Read the whole article”
Why? Does it get funnier?
Retrofitting a blade heating system would be expensive but it takes a huge amount of power to run the heaters. A veritable shed load of ninety foot blades with enough heating elements and run for the duration of a cold spell would not make sense, its cheaper to shut the whole farm down until the weather improves. But wait theres more! Composite blades cannot be heated because it affects the lifespan of the blades, makes them too flexible and therefore prone to setting up a particular vibration pattern that eventually tears the blade apart fibre by fibre or shakes the turbine into an early oblivion.
Twenty turbines running heating elements in steel/alloy blades would consume more power than the farm generates on a good day, they could bring in a portable generator but that would consume an awful lot of fuel and make even the generous subsidies disappear faster then Al Gore at a press conference.
Rock? meet hard place!
Modern, MW-scaled wind turbines are among the most highly sophisticated and well-engineered pieces of power generating equipment on the market. If properly cared for, these devices work quite reliably for years and provide a good rate of return for the owners. The wind turbines shown are designed and supplied by a very experienced and capable company. Icing is an issue that has been addressed as well as possible for years through heaters on control anemometers, in gearboxes, etc., but blades have been a challenge. Ice reduces blade production effectiveness by a few tens of percent and can lead to deleterious vibrations due to imbalance. Typically, blades will ice up under the right environmental conditions and will often lose their ice within a day or two of an icing event – if the sun comes out. In ice-prone regions, project production and economic pro forma estimates take these factors into account. Some years, icing is worse than others. This may be a particularly bad year.
bill says:
February 17, 2011 at 12:35 pm
“Last I heard, wind power costs 1.20/kwh…”
Here’s another way of looking at it, from the U.S. perspective:
“the relative subsidies for various energy sources… wind and solar get in the neighborhood of 100 times the subsidy that oil and gas do, per unit of energy produced (according to the Energy Information Administration): $23.50 per MwH for wind, $24.50 for solar, $0.25 for oil and gas, whereas coal gets $0.44, nukes about $1.60, and dams $0.60)”
http://www.nationalreview.com/planet-gore/231257/yes-lets-give-renewables-chance-compete/chris-horner
Not sure how much more that subsidy effectively is when no power is produced.
With oil, coal, nuclear, and gas, You do not have to control the weather.
AGW is responsible for more snow, so i heard from climate scientists, because there’s more moisture in the air. Wouldn’t this lead to more ice on the wind turbine blades and an increase in wind power failures; prompting us to use more fossil fuels – a positive feedback! A tipping point! So wind power is obviously incapable of stopping AGW. Same for snowed-in PV panels.
Leaves only nuclear and man-sized hamster wheels.
“the company that owns and operates the site, is working to return the windmills to working order”
With the help of fossil fuels, no doubt.
Soak the wind turbine with vinegar and sprinkel baking soda on it. The resulting CO2 should produce the heat to get rid of the ice.
If this doesn’t work then call Al Gore.
/sarc
A link to an official UK site which gives electricity generated by fuel source.
http://www.geog.ox.ac.uk/~dcurtis/NETA.html
Installed wind = 4.2 GW. Note the % contribution of wind to total consumption cf to the interconnector from France (nuclear) and the % of headline installed capacity.
There must be similar information for the US.
“We can’t control the weather,” Julie Vitek said: a refreshing breath of honesty.
erik sloneker says:
February 17, 2011 at 11:16 am
What do you suppose will happen when these monuments to economic illiteracy are no longer subsidized by a gullible public and are decommissioned?
It appears that they will look like this:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/46145831@N00/1345239056/
I’m agnostic on AGW, but believe there’s a moral case for reducing consumption of fossil fuel (it can’t be right for three or four generations of mankind to consume all that was ever laid down. I can therefore grit my teeth and stomach paying towards wind generation subsidy – so long as it isn’t in fact making the situation worse! Can anyone point me towards a thorough Carbon Benefit / Cost analysis for (particularly) some low load-factor turbines? Will they ever displace enough fossil fuel consumption to outweigh that embedded in their manufacture, installation, maintenance, dismantling and recyling; plus that consumed in maintaining spinning backup during their operational life?