I wonder what the incident frequency is for wind turbine fires versus say coal, hydro, or nuclear plants?
From STV Scotland:
Mr McMahon, who captured the spectacular fire in photos, added: “I didn’t hear any explosion or anything, but my wife shouted for me to come down and see the fire.
“There are around 13 or 15 wind turbines in the farm above Ardrossan. They were all off today because of the high winds, so something has obviously shorted out and gone on fire.
h/t to WUWT reader Gordon Daily
UPDATE: BBC reports in the south of Scotland the 50mph winds are knocking down turbines:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-south-scotland-16084013
The Europeans, aided and abetted by environmentalists, have been doing their best to shoot themselves in the foot since 2006. Fresh from their success in banning lead in auto gas, they decided to ban lead in solder. The result was a resurgence of the problem that led to the use of lead in solder in the first place: the growth of microscopic tin whiskers. Small but deadly for electronic circuits, these whiskers cause an unquantified decrease in the reliability of electronics employing lead-free solder. The problem is bad enough that lead solder is exempted from the legislation and is used in military electronics and medical equipment.
A surprisingly candid article was published in the Guardian newspaper in 2008:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/apr/03/research.engineering
Another eye-wateringly expensive burden ($32Bn + $3Bn annually) brought to you by environmentalists. Sad really when this accounts for only 2% of world lead consumption; batteries – 90% (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restriction_of_Hazardous_Substances_Directive).
Blair says:
December 8, 2011 at 12:57 pm
There are a great many vertical axis wind generators already on the market. Most settle for three or four blades rather than the Beehive design of barn ventilators.
http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Vertical_Axis_Wind_Turbines
In the UK, the wind farm owner makes more money by taking the windmills offline during gales. Hence, green energy is indeed capitalistically sound – even factoring in the occasional windmill explosion – as long as you are the person who owns the windmills.
Dave Springer says:
December 8, 2011 at 1:07 pm
It was a gust on top of one of Scotland’s highest mountains – Cairngorm. Not much to damage up there (ski lifts and funicular station/shop/restaurant).
The UK’s equivalent of Mount Washington NH (highest gust 231mph).
“Boom, then Blowdown for Wind Energy’s Sinovel
Explosive growth marked the start-up years before mishaps and market conditions took a toll on China’s wind power giant
A looming turbine tower half as high as Beijing’s tallest skyscraper cast a long shadow over the Sinovel Wind manufacturing plant and a group of local government leaders recently before something went terribly wrong.
Some say the October 10 accident at the Gansu Province plant that killed five people – including three local government officials and two Sinovel workers – was inevitable for a company that’s been growing too fast for its own good.
Officials say the arm of the 1,000-ton crane built by Zoomlion Heavy Industries snapped and fell onto the entourage, which had gathered to watch the assembling of the tower with its 5-megawatt turbine and blades 100 meters in diameter.
The dead included Yu Yongding, management committee director for the Jiuquan Industrial Park where the plant is located. Also killed were Yu’s his wife, who worked as a city government official, and a Yu subordinate.
The cause of the accident has yet to be determined, and Sinovel Vice President Tao Gang told reporters that it’s unclear whether the crane’s mechanics or an operator played a role. In his opinion, the crane apparently lost its balance while hoisting the turbine onto the tower.
Tao added that the event had marked the company’s first attempt to assemble a 5-megawatt turbine on land. The specially built crane was new as well.”
http://english.caixin.cn/2011-11-21/100329724.html
(Original story appears to have been erased from website.)
the thing is that we were feeding power in to stop the damn thing rotating….!
read the reports Dave Springer…debris was reported, un fortunately…this is a bad engineering failure…but winds of this speed only happen every year in this part of the world, Why did someone not let the engineers do something about this?
That picture of the male polar bear eating a young polar has been blamed on warming forcing the bears to cannibalize, more doom and gloom. The alarmists conveniently left out the part nothing new here, normal behavior. Grizzlies will also do the same.
Wouldn’t it be ironic if the insurance sector starts refusing cover to turbines that are exposed to wind because of the risk of damage.
ZT says:
December 8, 2011 at 1:41 pm
“In the UK, the wind farm owner makes more money by taking the windmills offline during gales. Hence, green energy is indeed capitalistically sound – even factoring in the occasional windmill explosion – as long as you are the person who owns the windmills.”
Fixed prices are socialist, not capitalist.
Good grief, the storm is now heading for Denmark! What will happen with all its windfarms?
Phillip Bratby says: December 8, 2011 at 11:28 am
Thanks, I’ve bookmarked that page (your work? because if so, I’d like to know the rate of accidents per turbine, is that increasing or decreasing, what is the cost of all these problems per turbine, and what percentage is that of the construction-and-running cost?
Also it would be nice to see, graphically quantified, the amount of turbines needed (land covered) to replace… one nuclear power station… the whole country…
Also it would be nice to see more graphically the real problems of intermittency.
@KTWO
The Darius rotors (vertical) were the subject of a very long series of investigations by the NRC in Canada under Dr Peter South (for a long time). They have an inherent problem which is that the blades do not pull continuously. When a blade ‘at the back’ starts its swing forward it pulls harder and harder on the central column until 45 deg then it slacks off to zero when the blade is facing straight into the wind. At that point the opposite blade has been pulled from the front to the middle very hard with a sinusodial ‘yank’. This puts extreme stresses on the root of the blades. Adding bracing helps – usually two horizontal bars from one blade to the other.
For the next 90 degrees of rotation, both blades pull quite hard but unequally, then the second one is at the back and starts it acceleration forward, forcing the first blade around from the front. The motion looks smooth but there are high stresses in them because of all the accelerations and swapping roles as puller, pulled, puller, pulled.
In high winds the blade is parked edge-to-the-wind because the wind hitting the blade side-on can break them.
The blade density is low and the tip seed high (6 to 7) so they make a LOT of noise. In a 50 kph wind the blade centre is going about 350. Even 3 metre ones are serious aircraft-level design works. The normal ‘fan mills’ are smoother though they still have the shadow of the tower creating a vibration as the blades lose thrust one after the other as they pass behind it.
In 1982 a Canadian 3-metre aluminum rotor was placed in a wind tunnel in Pretoria, South Africa and the wind taken up to 100 kph. It did nothing. The operators called the researcher (who they refused to allow to help them ‘run it’ because he was only an ‘engineering’ prof) and laughed at him telling him he got ripped off – it was useless! He told them it was not self-starting – duh! Oh…. so they again ramped up the wind and gave it a spin. As they had no braking or load on it, it immediately spun up to a tip speed of about 650 kph within seconds and exploded taking out major pieces of the installation. Imagine if a 50 metre version had a brake failure!
Windmills are great for pumping water and generating small amounts of power on light aircraft.
Let’s hope that all the vanes blow off these windmills, the playthings of deranged believers in the Cult of Global Warming.
A rather large roman candle.
I don’t know about that. I was once working at a coal plant where two units were down and I was heat-treating some welds on one of the generators. Meantime the generator next to me was having some repairs done on the hydrogen cooling system, and it turned out that the hydrogen in the lines hadn’t been properly purged and suddenly there was a boom and dust on the top of the generator jumped into the air. Luckily the explosion was contained inside the generator or I might have gotten hurt. I did return to that plant a few weeks later and there were some bent up baffles that were being replaced laying there. I suspect some operators had to take training in how to properly purge a hydrogen line after that.
The 165mph gusts were in the peaks of the Cairngorms, some 100 miles North of Coldingham, where winds were forecast at 50mph.
This was a truly feeble turbine.
I haven’t seen any detailed reports so this is pure speculation, but…
The usual high-wind failure modes of turbines are snapped pitch linkages and yaw system damage. In both cases, the wind exerts such a high force on either the blades or the Nacelle that it breaks something.
Fires are usually caused by forcing the rotor to turn while the shaft brake is engaged – these things typically have several MNm of torque available, so no brake is going to hold it. So at a guess, the fire started with the wind breaking the pitch linkages, allowing the blades to go to fine pitch. The shaft brake was on because the turbine was parked, so once the blades started to lift, the brakes got hot and started a fire.
The one that fell over is a bit harder to guess. Possibly since it wasn’t turned on yet it was not fully commissioned our even assembled. It also looks quite small.
Windmills can’t stand the wind…. PRICELESS!
BWAHAHAHAHAAAAA…
I love how the BBC tell us how the little one that fell over suffered from “a break system failure”
I think someone at The Beeb has failed -not least because the hapless windmill actually managed to break itself really quite successfully.
Now, whether its brakes were up to job is another matter…
I’m guessing that was an electrical fire caused by either faulty components or bad switching from the control guys. Seems doubtful that friction caused it. This is not to take away from the humor of the image.
Boss: So what could possibly go wrong with these things?
Engineer: Well, with too much wind they could crash and burn.
Boss: How often would that happen?
Engineer: About once in every three to five years.
Boss: Oh, heck, we’ll be out of business by then. Put em up!
Billy Liar says:
December 8, 2011 at 1:48 pm
Dave Springer says:
December 8, 2011 at 1:07 pm
It was a gust on top of one of Scotland’s highest mountains – Cairngorm. Not much to damage up there (ski lifts and funicular station/shop/restaurant).
The UK’s equivalent of Mount Washington NH (highest gust 231mph).
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Wouldn’t this seem to be a weakness of wind power generators, placing them where there is the most wind?
August signs
MIKE Ritchie, watching the severe weather conditions on America’s Eastern seaboard, tells us: “Hurricane Irene has been downgraded to a Scottish summer.”
http://www.heraldscotland.com/comment/ken-smiths-diary/the-diary-1.1120751
Scottish winter
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/17591105-post54.html
What was the total value of the capital destoryed by one windy day?