It all started when the Gorran School got the bright idea that a wind turbine would solve all their electrical bills while doing some feel good environmentalism. The BBC was ecstatic when they reported on it back in 2008:
A Cornish primary school could soon be almost completely powered by a single wind turbine.
The turbine should be up and running by the end of March
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Gorran Primary School on the Roseland, has secured more than £50,000 from different agencies to carry out the work on the 15m (49ft) high turbine.
It should be up and running at the end of March at the school made famous by Anne Treneer’s autobiography The Schoolhouse in the Wind.
The head teacher Matthew Oakley says it should save the school £5,000 a year.
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And then, reality came crashing down to Earth:
Wind brings down turbine 02/12/2009 The Newquay Voice
THE eco-dream of a village school turned into a Friday 13th nightmare when high winds destroyed their wind turbine.
Two blades flew off from the 15m tall turbine in Gorran School’s playing field during the bad weather earlier this month. The turbine was part of the school’s £53,000 plan to generate its own electricity,
On the afternoon of Friday, November 13, the school was advised to turn on the brakes to stop the turbine, but the brakes failed, causing two blades to detach in the early hours of Saturday morning.
A concerned parent said: “Thank God it happened when the children were not out on the field. Looking at the size and weight of those rotor blades, I dread to think what would have happened if they had snapped off while they were there.”
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This is not the first problem Gorran School have experienced with their wind turbine. Only seven months after it was erected in July 2008 it went on the blink. It was repaired by the manufacturers at the time at no cost to the school, and they were reimbursed for the lost generation while the turbine was not working.
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Now today, the company has walked away from the mess according to the Telegraph, and the school has a pile of scrap:
Eco-friendly school left out of pocket after ‘unproven’ wind turbine breaks
An eco-friendly school has been left £55,000 out of pocket after its wind turbine broke – with governors admitting that it was based on “completely unproven technology”.
The company that installed the turbine has gone bust leaving the school with a pile of scrap.
The Gorran School in Cornwall revealed its 15 metre turbine in 2008 which was designed to provide it with free electricity – and sell any surplus power to the National Grid.
The system was seen as a green blueprint for clean, sustainable energy for schools nationwide and received grants from various bodies including the EDF power firm.
But soon after being installed the wind turbine became faulty and after a few months seized up – showering the school’s playing field with debris.
Since then the school has been locked in a battle with suppliers Proven Energy which has now gone into administration leaving the school with little hope of any money being returned – and a pile of scrap in their field.
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Having learned nothing in Gorran, they are still at it, from the BBC on August 19th:
19 August 2011 Last updated at 03:31 ET
Wind energy for Gorran community
The turbines at Gorran may be generating power within a matter of weeks
The small community of Gorran in south Cornwall will soon be generating its own energy and exporting surplus to the national grid.
Work to erect two community wind turbines at a cost of £500,000 is well under way.
Community Power Cornwall, a local co-operative, is behind the project.
The organisation has helped the villagers in Gorran to look at its energy needs and developed a renewable energy scheme.
‘Big symbol’
Villager Ella Westland, from Transition Gorran, said clean energy production and low carbon living were “things many villagers have been working towards for a long time”.
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Yeah ‘Big Symbol’ alright – of FAIL. Just look at all the FAIL in California.
Figured this article was the place for this bit of news. might even deserve its own header.
(Reuters) – An Obama administration appointee at the Energy Department pressed White House analysts to sign off on a $535 million loan to Solyndra even though his wife worked for the failed solar panel maker’s law firm.
But this might be so sensitive, carrying it might have repercussions.
Is the party responsible for the order-of-magnitude spending increase named Chu, perhaps? I think one’s gone missing over here, though rumor has it that he’s just under a bus somewhere.
Don Keiller says:
October 7, 2011 at 11:21 am
Only 659 names on the Repeal Climate Change Act.
Get signing!!
[Reply: Posting a hotlink would be helpful. ~dbs, mod.]
http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/2035
If you think this is bad, last week my son’s school showed The Day After Tomorrow in his Ethics class….
For this interested, £55K buys enough juice from the grid to provide 3.5KW continuously between now and about August 2024.
Reliably – at the flick of a switch. 24x7xx365. Not too much sometimes and none at all at other times.
Tried and tested technology, very low maintenance, and – if treated with respect – unlikely to injure any children or adults.
Certainly no chance of a catastrophic parts failure causing the school to be showered with high-speed kiddiwink destroyers. No special insurance required.
TimTheToolMan says:
£53,000 worth of PV solar panels on thr school’s roof would have been a better investment IMO. Wind is too high maintenance, too many moving parts to go wrong.
Probably better to heat water. This gets around the issue of availability not matching demand.
Reminds me of a site near where i grew up – 2 times folks tried erecting wind turbines there, and the lasted only a few years before the maintenance costs became unsustainable, Sounds like the school has a history and economics FAIL also.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equinox_Mountain
Mark writes “Probably better to heat water. This gets around the issue of availability not matching demand.”
Yes although I would think hybrid systems ought to be doing better than they seem to be. Typically PV solar is only 10-15% efficient leaving 85-90% of the energy as heat which could be used to heat the water. Best of both worlds. Plus, I imagine, there ought to be additional efficiency benefits to cooling the panels.
You know with all those kids you have excess energy that needs to be worked off, they would have been better served IF they had installed power generating treadmills and had the kids walk off their excess energy during recess. http://inhabitat.com/human-powered-gyms-in-hong-kong/
Waste not, want not. I say the school should start teaching metal shop classes and have the kids make useful projects out of the scrap from the turbine.
I agree that people ought to use a careful benefit/cost analyses–and don’t. The Trustees at the college didn’t when they were talked into putting up on at the satellite campus. Windmills are not a total waste. There are places where they are the economical choice for power. The trouble is, in most places they are not even close, and so the more of them we put up, the poorer we become.
I have noticed some negative comments regarding solar panels on this site (not just in this thread). We live completely off the grid and our solar system furnishes pretty much all of our needs. It’s really is all about location, location, location. South Australia must be one of the better ppaces on earth to run a stand alone solar setup. I wouldn’t dream of trying it in England
The first question that must be asked of wind power (or any other alternative energy) is: will it return more power than went into its fabrication? If the answer is no, then do not proceed.
The sad fact about wind power is that it has an Energy Returned On Energy Invested ratio of no more than 0.29.
Wind Power is unsustainable, yet politicians keep pooring the taxpayers’s money into this foolish scam.
I was a child of the seventies. I was taught that wind and solar were going to save us because fossil fuels would be exausted by the year 2000…Now, we have discovery after discovery resulting in fossil fuel finds that can power our economies for hundreds of years…The politicians are the fools, charlatans and grifters who have wrought havoc on our way of life. They keep fighting the free market and they lose every time, with our money!
The western politician model for prosperity:
1. Destroy traditional energy and replace it with green energy costing multitudes more than fossil fuels.
2. ???
3. Prosperity
The chinese model:
1. Build a coal fired electric generating plant every week.
2. Build nuclear plants as fast as possible.
3. Use profits from selling cheap goods to westerners to purchase rights to world energy resources.
4. Remain the world’s manufacturer with cheap energy.
5. Prosperity
You decide which model makes sense…