As many know, I was on a road trip for two weeks. On my return into California, I traveled a road I had done many many times – California Highway 58 through Tehachapi pass, one of the windiest areas of California, and loaded with wind turbines like you see in this photo from www.wind-works.org which seems to be taken during 2003. All the turbines seem to be spinning.
But, the reality I encounter when I drive through there is much different than what you see in the photo above. I often drive this road, but always wished I had a video camera with me to show how many turbines are inoperable since this doesn’t show up well in still photos. Unless you have a slow shutter speed to show “blade blur”, they all look inoperable.
But this day was different. I did have a video camera with me. Plus, the day I drove through, Tuesday, March 15th, 2011 was near perfect for wind turbines. There was a front coming in, and strong winds ahead of it.
Here’s the wind data from the ASOS at the Tehachapi airport during the time I drove through:
The wind data displayed above are measured at 1000′ lower elevation than the wind turbines on the top of the ridge, where the wind velocity will be higher.
And here is what I saw of the wind turbines along the ridge top, there were quite a few inoperable on this windy day. This video was taken right about 11AM PST:
There were many more inoperable turbines, but could not be filmed from a safe vantage point along the highway. This video was take from the semi-truck staging area near the agricultural inspection station.
My best guess from the video and others I saw that I could not film is that about one in four turbines were not operating.
The problem is maintenance. The location, while perfect for wind, is treacherous for work and support equipment. Even on a flat terrain, like in Texas (shown below) where I photographed these turbines, doing maintenance on gearboxes and generators high up on a post isn’t easy.
Imagine the complications on a mountain ridge for maintenance.
On the wind-works.org website “tour” section, they lament the condition of the Zond (Enron) wind power sites:
Wind Plant Maintenance Items to Note
Throughout the Tehachapi-Mojave area look for turbines without nose cones, turbines without nacelles (blown off and not replaced), oil leaking from blade-pitch seals, oil leaking from gearboxes, road cuts in steep terrain, erosion gullies, non-operating turbines, and “bone piles” of junk parts. One Zond bone pile of abandoned fiberglass blades is visible on the east side of Tehachapi-Willow Springs Rd. near Oak Creek Pass. (Kern County doesn’t permit on-ground disposal of fiberglass.) While touring wind farm sites look for blowing trash and litter (plastic bags, soft-drink cups, bottles, electrical connectors, scrap bits of metal, and so on). These all reflect management’s attention to maintenance and general housekeeping. At the better sites, you won’t see any of this.
Even on the valley floor, the smaller four turbines just west of the Tehachapi airport that greet visitors who drive in from Bakersfield had a problem, and these are on flat ground and accessible:
In Palm Springs, CA, another windy place, they have similar problems:
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Florida’s broken windmills: A California problem
The permit allowing windmills to go in didn’t say they could sit there broken. Palm Springs is getting tough. If windmills are going to exist in the city they must be operational. A city that has welcomed windmills since it was first approached about them in the early 1980’s is finding that many of those windmills are no longer working and it wants them fixed. The question is who’s responsible for fixing them? Florida Power and Light (FPL), the owner of the inoperable windmills, was allowed to install and operate local windmill farms under a conditional use permit (CUP) stipulating if the windmill does not run for six months, it’s declared a public nuisance and without a hearing, must be abated.
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Here’s a video showing the inside operations of a wind power facility in Washington State
And, the lack of maintenance problem is not just in California. In 2001, I visited Kamoa wind farm near Southpoint in the big island of Hawaii. The wind is so strong there, trees grow horizontal like this one:
As much as I was surprised by the horizontal trees, I was equally surprised to see dead wind turbines there. It was my first experience with a wind farm.
From this American Thinker article “Wind energy’s ghosts”:
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Built in 1985, at the end of the boom, Kamaoa soon suffered from lack of maintenance. In 1994, the site lease was purchased by Redwood City, CA-based Apollo Energy.
Cannibalizing parts from the original 37 turbines, Apollo personnel kept the declining facility going with outdated equipment. But even in a place where wind-shaped trees grow sideways, maintenance issues were overwhelming. By 2004 Kamaoa accounts began to show up on a Hawaii State Department of Finance list of unclaimed properties. In 2006, transmission was finally cut off by Hawaii Electric Company.
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Image from Waymarking.com
Again, like in California, Hawaii’s turbine problem is lack of maintenance.
But isn’t that the way it always has been with windmills?
It seems the more things change, the more they stay the same:
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UPDATE: It appears Idaho is getting set for putting a wind power moratorium in place:
State Lawmakers Look At Wind Energy Moratorium
Mar 18, 2011 6:16 p.m.
BONNEVILLE COUNTY, Idaho — Construction of wind turbines may be coming to a halt in Idaho.
State lawmakers are considering a bill that would prevent the construction of any new wind farm for the next two years.
Over the last year, dozens of new wind turbines have gone up on east bench just outside Idaho Falls, but many of the neighbors and their legislators want to put a temporary end to new construction.
When the legislature adopted the 2007 energy plan, it did not envision so many energy companies wanting to build wind farms in Idaho.
Bill sponsor Erik Simpson said he and both his Republican and Democratic colleagues agree they need to take a look at the long-term consequences.
“Local governments need some direction as to what should be included in some of their ordinances, recognizing some of the impacts that are out there on wind, and we need to find out what those impacts might be,” said State Affairs Committee member Tom Loertcher.
To conduct the study, the bill proposes a two-year moratorium on wind farm construction.
“It may be a problem mostly in eastern Idaho now, but it’s likely to be a problem in (other legislators’) communities as well unless we take this two year pause and study this a little more in depth,” Simpson said.
Wind power is not the cheapest way to produce energy, and lawmakers want to make sure their constituents don’t have to pay top rate.
“Utility rate payers are paying more for this unreliable intermittent energy source,” Simpson said.
Many are also concerned about the environment.
“A lot of these projects are going up in pristine wildlife areas,” Simpson said.
But not everyone agrees. Some local people like Bonneville County farmer Tory Talbot want to continue to see more turbines.
“The moratorium will basically limit businesses wanting to come into Idaho. Southeastern Idaho and southern Idaho has a huge wind energy potential,” Talbot said.
The State Affairs Committee plans to continue the debate on Monday when they hear from utility companies and energy companies.
They will then vote on whether they should move the bill to the House floor.
If the bill passes, any project already approved would be allowed to move forward.
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UPDATE2: The maintenance problem also extends to Germany:
From: jcwinnie.biz
“Gearboxes have been failing in wind turbines since the early 1990s. Barely a turbine make has escaped. The problem reached epidemic proportions with a massive series failure of gearboxes in NEG Micon machines. At the time, the NEG Micon brand was the most sold wind turbine in the world. The disaster brought the company to its knees ; It was taken over by Vestas, the world’s largest wind turbine manufacturer, which still is challenged by gearbox and rotor failures.
As previously noted, a large number of gearboxes have had to be replaced “in large numbers.” Der Spiegel reports that the German Insurance Association is none too happy…
“In addition to generators and gearboxes, rotor blades also often display defects,” a report on the technical shortcomings of wind turbines claims. The insurance companies are complaining of problems ranging from those caused by improper storage to dangerous cracks and fractures… The frail turbines coming off the assembly lines at some manufacturers threaten to damage an industry that for years has been hailed as a wild success.
At Spiegel Online, Simone Kaiser and Michael relay a concern about installed wind turbines:
After the industry’s recent boom years, wind power providers and experts are now concerned. The facilities may not be as reliable and durable as producers claim. Indeed, with thousands of mishaps, breakdowns and accidents having been reported in recent years, the difficulties seem to be mounting. Gearboxes hiding inside the casings perched on top of the towering masts have short shelf lives, often crapping out before even five years is up. In some cases, fractures form along the rotors, or even in the foundation, after only limited operation. Short circuits or overheated propellers have been known to cause fires. All this despite manufacturers’ promises that the turbines would last at least 20 years.
Thank you Anthony, your article was most instructive and interesting.
The article ‘Downstream of a Green’ links to the Daily Mail story on the mining of rare earth minerals in inner Mongolia and the manufacture of magnets for wind-turbines. The ensuing horrific damage to local people and the agricultural area from the waste-products is described.
http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2011/03/20/downstream-of-green/
I think you need to educate yourself a bit about how wind turbines work. You may not realise this but wind turbines actually work BETTER in low winds. They can’t actually cope with very high winds – these cause the blades of the turbine to be furled so they don’t blow over. That’s probably why you saw so few working on a very windy day – many of them were self-protecting. Of course the rest were probably outputting a relatively high level of energy so the fact that some were self-protecting didn’t result in a below average output of electrical power.
Jessie says:
March 21, 2011 at 1:14 am
…mining of rare earth minerals in inner Mongolia and the manufacture of magnets for wind-turbines.
Less than three percent of the rare earths mined are for “super magnets”. The Chinese REE mining story is not about wind turbines.
This was discussed at some length on the Wind Concerns Ontario Site. References are there.
http://windconcernsontario.wordpress.com/2011/02/26/wind-energy%E2%80%99s-dirty-secret/
It is a story about bad mining practice. Period.
kellys_eye says:
March 20, 2011 at 9:12 am
I suspect a worldwide survey of all wind farms would produce some interesting statistics – especially regarding inefficiency – but it beggars belief that anyone responsible for the creation of such farms would knowingly proceed with historical and technical facts at hand.
Well — here is some information from Ontario Canada — official numbers even.
http://ontariowindperformance.wordpress.com/2010/09/24/chapter-3-1-powering-ontario/
The link to the original paper that examined Ontario Production is at the end of the article — along with links to the source data.
Are the turbines inefficient? Maybe useless is the right word.
Anyone with with real world experience can tell you that maintenance costs are 90% of the cost of most things.
It takes people and a technology base to keep things running.
And the older the systems get the more expensive it is to maintain them as people and the technology base get older and start to be retired.
In addition, most systems need a complete replacement every so often.
Maintenance also requires motivated management to keep the teams focused, staffed, trained, supplied, and responsive.
This kind of management is very hard to find and to keep as they get it from all different directions and must be intrinsically motivated. Few have what it takes to be successful.
Wind power is not immune to the principles of engineering management.
And with thousands of complex structures scattered around the landscape with each just producing a small fraction of the energy a gas turbine or nuke plant, wind requires a much larger amount of commitment per unit of energy produced.
Anthony,
Science still has not figured out that there is a HUGE difference from harnessing energy from the radius of a circle to the circumference of one. Also missed how centrifugal force interacts to generate friction and drag.
Dave Springer says:
March 20, 2011 at 6:19 pm Only an ignorant anti-green can be unaware of the fact that high neutron flux causes even the best steel to go brittle and become a very high maintenance piece of equipment. So there.
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I’m not sure how credible your claims are. I’ve never heard of nuclear power being knocked on the basis of poor reliability. The fact that nuclear power powers our stategic submarine and air craft carrier fleet suggests to me that the maintenance intervals are long and the reliability is quite high. Most of all nuclear actually creates the power needed on demand. So-called wind turbines are often down due to lack of wind or too much wind even when they’re not down due to mechanical failure. On top of that it requires huge numbers of wind turbines arrayed over huge expanses of land to even theoretically approach what a single nuclear plant produces.
BTW the Fukushima plant didn’t exaclty destroy itself. The Tsunami and mega quake factored in a tad.
BlondieBC says:
March 20, 2011 at 5:09 am
Twenty-Five percent of the turbines being down at any given times seems to be on the low-end of the expected range. What percentage of nuclear plants, fighter aircraft, or merchant ships are at sea at any given time?
Blondie,
Do you have a point in your comparison of primary power producing nuclear plants to other machines whose function is power consumption? The requirements for each are quite different. The purpose for the existence of each is quite different.
The fighter aircraft are constructed with the tradeoff of sacrificing components of the machine to achieve high performance. The high attrition level of components makes it necessary to for substantial portion of the machine’s lifetime be dedicated to maintenance.
Merchant ships are designed for economics. A good portion of a merchant ships lifetime is spent waiting to be loaded and unloaded. Time spent not being used is not equivalent to time being unavailable.
You want to look at capacity utilization of nuclear power plant? Investigate the time available for the reactors on Ballistic Missile Submarines while on patrol. The number 99.9% comes to mind.
Actually Anthony; if you check out that photo again you will see quite clearly that NOT ALL of those fans are turning.
The photographer deliberately took a long enough exposure so you can clearly see the blade rotation in the foreground propellors.
Now look up at the top again and you can see that a great many of the fans are stone cold dead. If they all were rotating, they also all would be phase locked; some clearly are not.
I drive that route to SoCal regularly, and there are always dozens of stopped fans even when the wind is howling through there. They also used to have a lot of vertical turbines up there, which don’t care about wind direction. They also suck because of vertical wind shear; which every sailor is familiar with.. There’s very little wind at ground level. So no more verticals.
“”””” Ryan says:
March 21, 2011 at 3:30 am
I think you need to educate yourself a bit about how wind turbines work. You may not realise this but wind turbines actually work BETTER in low winds. They can’t actually cope with very high winds – these cause the blades of the turbine to be furled so they don’t blow over. “”””””
Good advice you should follow too.
So you design your windmill for best efficiency at some wind speed; say 10 mph just to have a number. If the wind speed drops to five mph, you just lost 87.5% of your entire plant capacity. So clearly 12.5% of desing working capacity is not a useful condition. You are better off to shut them all down to save wear and tear on the gear boxes.
And if the wind speed went up by five to 15mph, the loads on the fan and tower would be 2.25 times higher. So just to handle a 3:1 wind speed range, you have to design for peak stresses that are more than double the design operating conditions. You will get more than three times the power at the 15 mph wind.
And when you shut them down in high winds, you better turn them perpendicular to the wind; because the wind thrust which puts an axial load on the bearings, will go up much faster with the blade not turning. So even with the prop feathered, you can’t leave the fan face on to the wind.
And it is sails that get furled in high winds; not propellors.
“”””” Feet2theFire says:
March 20, 2011 at 9:15 pm
If we are going to have these at all, I think the current design is flawed and should be replaced by a better design. As a mechanical engineer, I don’t like those really long propeller blades. “””””
Well not being a mechanical engineer, I had this totally idiotic notion that somehow the maximum power you could extract from the wind, with a propellor was somehow related to the area of the air column that was intercepted. As if force was pressure times area or something like that.
One observation; following your long blade abhorence, would be that when you look at say a three blade propellor, you can immediately see that most of the wind just goew right on by the propellor, in the gaps that fill most of the space. I doubt that even 5% of the area is occupied by propellor blades.
So why not make (much) shorter blades, and then connect the blade tips with a pair of concentric (short) cylinders; and then fill those cylinders with a whole raft of blades, so that the entire perimeter area was occupied by blades (maybe half of it anyhow) like a real axial flow turbine.
The blade tip cyclinders wouldn’t need to have much weight or strength; they are simply a rotating duct. You could ditch the outer (or inner ) cyclinder to save weight, but a fully ducted turbine blade is probably more efficient by enough to justfiy a fully ducted design.
The radial “struts” would now be just supports for the annular ducted fan; but you might as well put a (fixed) air foil on them anyway.
Yes I know they would look ugly as sin; but they do that now anyway.
kuhnkat says: March 20, 2011 at 8:21 pm
Dan in California,
sit down and compute how much wind power and volume of pumped storage you would need to actually make wind somewhat comeptitive and useful. It is outrageous.
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I have done those calculations and I agree. It is outrageous. Wind power is far from competitive when storage is included. My point is that most windfarms can overload the grid, but the Tehachapi wind farm is connected to a large capacitor. Therefore, it’s not quite so stupid as most. I freely admit that during the time of greatest need, afternoons in the summer, the wind turbines are frequently just sitting there.
Here’s my reference for local grid activity: http://www2.caiso.com/ In the summer it runs at about twice the rate as in the winter. Therefore, thermal plants (coal, nuke, gas) schedule their maintenance downtime at off peak times, whereas wind power is completely unpredictable.
“”””” Dave Springer says:
March 20, 2011 at 6:10 pm
Dan in California says:
March 20, 2011 at 2:52 pm
As for subsidies, they take several forms. There are loan guarantees, there are State requirementsfor the utilities to buy a minimum of “renewable” power regardless of cost, and there is the Federal Production tax credit (PTC). The latter amounts to $.015 per KWH, or roughly half the cost to generate with coal or neutrons.
My emphasis.
This is misleading. The delivered average cost of electricity in the U.S. is close to $0.15/kwh so the wind subsidy is only 10% of the delivered cost. “””””
“Subsidies” by definition are costs that are borne by persons or businesses or corporations, who are not owners or shareholders of the subsidized eneterprise; and most often are not even customers of the subsidized “venture” so the payers of those subsidies (in compulsory taxes) are not beneficiaries of the subsized enterprise in any way (mostly).
And for every dollar that the subsidizee puts up (in taxes); he (it) has to generate 2-5 dollars in taxable profits (State and Federal). The long term average profitability of all coporations in the USA (for example) is about 4% after taxes, or 6% pretax, so the subsidizee needs to do about $16-$17 dollars in profitable enterprise for each dollar of profit, or32 to 85 dollars for each dollar in subsidy.
And that 32 to 85 dollars of private enterprise capitalism probably does so using fossil fuels that are readily available for their energy source; all to boost the miserable public picture of a failed idea; that can’t stand on its own two feet.
George E. Smith says: March 21, 2011 at 10:33 am
Now look up at the top again and you can see that a great many of the fans are stone cold dead. If they all were rotating, they also all would be phase locked; some clearly are not.
I drive that route to SoCal regularly, and there are always dozens of stopped fans even when the wind is howling through there.
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George, a dirty little secret of the Tehachapi wind farm is that there’s not enough transmission line to get the power out. When you drive through and see stopped mills, it’s likely that the wind companies are being paid to produce no power. really. That reason and not maintenance need is why you see a high fraction of the mills not turning when the wind is up. That problem has been fixed in the past few months as a new transmission line is being installed. There is another 740 MW of mills being installed now, and they’re marching downhill toward the town of Mojave. Also, the older 30 KW units are phase locked to the grid (that’s why they all turn the same speed) but the big new 1.5 MW mills have hydrostatic drive to optimize the RPM and blade pitch.
It sounds like a job for the Monkey Wrench Gang.
Anthony
I drove through Palm Springs a few years ago and what struck me also was the sheer number of windmills that were non-functioning. I thought it was around 1 in 8.
Dan in California,
and how could not including the pumped storage make it better?? Then you need the full backup all the time!! Wind is NOT useful for major generation. It is a nice gizmo, if they ever get the price down, for people who do not want to run the lines to their remote property or don’t want full dependence on the system. Of course, there is the co$t.
How do you schedule maintenance for the backup systems when the wind might stop tomorrow for a week?? You must have backup for your wind backup. Something not mentioned so far.
The companies jumping into wind are scraping the dollars from the various subsidies, loan guarantees, feed in tariffs… and apparently, from this article, would appear to realize that it will not last so are not putting any of the money back into the farms. Smart if all you care about is the money!!!
Shows what the Politicians and Al Gore are really doing!! Taking advantage of the latest scare to enrich themselves and friends. The enviro whackjobs are taking advantage of building a collapsing system in the hopes that we will not be able to dig our technology and energy based society out.
RockyRoad says:
March 20, 2011 at 10:36 am
Just found out that a report of Rossi’s E-Cat made a mainstream media outlet here in the states:
http://www.freeenergytimes.com/2011/03/19/frank-perley-of-the-washington-times-writes-op-ed-piece-about-rossi-focardi-cold-fusion-technology/
And here’s what one commenter says about it:
http://www.freeenergytimes.com/2011/03/19/frank-perley-of-the-washington-times-writes-op-ed-piece-about-rossi-focardi-cold-fusion-technology/
George E Smith…..’Yes I know they would look ugly as sin; but they do that now anyway.’
Oh thank’s George…… That’s a great idea then. The one’s I can see from my home, are often not turning because of low winds, not for any other reason. Don’t suggest having them sit there doing nothing, with attachments added to make them look uglier.
Now…..If you were to suggest adding rocket motors to the end of each blade, and have them whizz round like Catherine wheels, that would be something.
So I found the Cook’s tour of the Wind Turban; izzat any way related to a Ter-byne ? very informative. I learned for example that it was a zoom turban anywhere from 5 KW to 5 MW peak generating capability. Well maybe the real number is classified; a military secret; which explains why they never even mentioned the single most important fact you would want to know about a wind turban; like how much airspeed does it take to blow the turban off your head for example.
Well obfuscation is the prime art of the NEWS business.
“”””” Dan in California says:
March 21, 2011 at 11:33 am
George E. Smith says: March 21, 2011 at 10:33 am “””””
Dan, thanks for the details. I always wondered what those little tichy things were; 30 kW you say. And the big dudes are 1.5 MW. I always thought that the whole idea was to run the tip speed up to as high a mach number as you could for maximum prop efficiency; which is why I read all about the big long carbon composite blades they are building in Europe, that are too damn big to even move along the Autobahn(s).
I have mentioned that these things have a built in shake themselves to pieces vibration mode due to the vertical wind shear. The blade going over the top sees a drag and lift that increase as the square of the wind speed; but going over the near ground point the wind speed is a lot lower so you get both an axial blade bending, and thrust bearing load oscillation as well as a torsional blade bending and circumferential acceleration mode all at the constant rotation frequency. Well if as you say, those big buggers are no longer phase locked (good idea); then at least it is a variable frequency vibration mode; which of course likely complicates the design of the blades for fatigue life.
I wonder if they feather the blade continuously to equalize the loads ? But it seems to me, you can fether so as to minimise the axial thrust variation with blade rotation, or you can feather it to maintain constant angular lift. I don’t think you can level out both drag and lift at the same time by prop feathering.
I took some closer pictures today of those same turbines. The farm farther south than the 58 has an even worse percentage of working units. Today (a fairly windy and cold day) there were only 10 or so working out of +100 in my immediate area.
The worst part; across the street they’re installing brand new giant units. Why fix the old ones when you can just install more?
Closeup pic I have shows how dirty these things really are with oil dripping down it. LKM if you want a copy.
But as long as the brainwashing in schools continues, people will still demand them, my daughter is in 5th grade and the chapter they are going over energy this week is on energy. Of course fosil fuels are portrayed as bad, wind , solar etc good.
Of course to counter act this, I discuss what I learn on this site. We just reviewed this post. Thanks to all of you.
WillR says: March 21, 2011 at 3:58 am
Thanks WillR, much appreciated, the links and commentary were informative.
I read the last blogger quotes Willis E and stating the article should be posted on the Wall of Shame.
Good luck with the $2 billion,the request proposed by blogger D Robinson in response to improving the manufacturing (+?mining) processes.
The recently reported China Development Forum 2011 may be an impetus for improvements in industry practices?
Pamela Gray says:
March 20, 2011 at 6:58 am
“Publicly funded jobs are never worth an investment of my taxes, short term or long term. ”
Do you have a problem with publicly funded private jobs (Northrup Grumman, etc) or public insurance for nuclear power plants (no private insurance companies will insure them)?