So much for Endurance…
From Louise Gray at The Telegraph:
Wind turbine collapses in high wind
A controversial 115ft wind turbine has collapsed after being hit by heavy winds.
The £250,000 tower, which stood as tall as a ten storey building, was hit by gale force gusts of 50mph.
The structure then collapsed at a farm in Bradworth, Devon, leaving a “mangled wreck”.
Margaret Coles, Chairwoman of Bradworthy District Council, said hail storms and strong winds have hit the area and the turbine, installed just three years ago, simply could not withstand the wind.
“The bolts on the base could not withstand the wind and as we are a very windy part of the country they [the energy company] have egg on their face,” she said. “There are concerns about safety.”
The Bradworthy Parish Council, who opposed the turbine, expressed concern that there was “nothing exceptional” in the speed of the winds.
Installed by renewable energy company Dulas it was supposed to have a life expectancy of 25 years.
Full story here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/windpower/9837026/Wind-turbine-collapses-in-high-wind.html
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Of course, Ms. Gray calls a 50 mph wind a “high wind”, but that sort of wind isn’t an unusual event for the area. Besides, the specs for the Endurance E-3120 wind turbine say:
Given its, ahem, endurance, one wonders if the council will allow it to be reconstructed. I’m thinking no.
Tim Clark says:
January 30, 2013 at 12:13 pm
{ Phillip Bratby says:
January 30, 2013 at 11:34 am
The Endurance E-3120 wind turbine is American/Canadian……… When you buy a cheap outdated design, you expect failures. When you have cowboy developers involved in the process, you get what you pay for. }
Just about time you paid us back for financing WWII.
Thanks.
Actually we did finish paying off our wartime debts just 6 years ago.
Britain to make its final payment on World War II loan from U.S. – Business – International Herald Tribune, December 28, 2006.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/28/business/worldbusiness/28iht-nazi.4042453.html?_r=0
We finished repaying our debts to the Canadians at the same time but rather typically the International Herald Tribune ignored Canada. We certainly need the US loans at the time but nevertheless there has always been mixed feelings about them in Britain because it was in the US interest to support us and the US was probably the only country to emerge from World War II richer than it started. Britain, in contrast, emerged from the war effectively bankrupt.
During the Napoleonic Wars Britain provided enormous sums of money to its allies and quite a lot of that was in the form of subsidies, not loans, because we knew it was in our interest to help them. The total British expenditure on the Napoleonic Wars was, in relative terms, greater than that in World War I and comparable to that in World War II.
Getting back to the subject of the environment, the “war” against CAGW would, if the Greens get their way, be as expensive as that of the Napoleonic Wars and the two World Wars and would probably not be in the interests of any country.
I’m sorry, but all I could do was laugh and laugh and laugh!
And laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh!!
Again!
RossP 12:47pm:
“Since when is 50mph gust gale force?”
A moderate gale starts at 31mph on the Beaufort Scale. 50mph is a strong gale on the Beaufort. I imagine that the steady speed would be over 31 to gust at 50.
RossP January 30, 2013 at 12:47 pm
“Gale” is a defined term in the UK because it uses the Beaufort Wind Scale:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/marine/guide/beaufortscale.html
“Gale” is Force 8 on the scale and starts at 39 mph or 17 m/s
50 mph is “storm”, Force 10.
The Scale was primarily founded on marine conditions. I suspect that gusts are likely to be less of a problem than on land (but others may know better …).
All they need is a short sharp chop near the base on the lee side when the wind is blowing.
Tonyb:
The foundation pad is usually a disc of reinforced concrete less than 2m thick (a pancake). DECC produces figures for UK home consumption of electricity. It averages about 4.7MWh/year. The data are available for all LPAs, for several years, going back from 2010.
Built to the highest available standards!
Here is an animation of burning willmills, 18 images.
http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/Windmills-burning.gif
50 KW for 250,000 pounds? What a bargain! I found this in about 15 secs on Google
http://www.affordablegenerator.com/50kW_60Hz_Cummins_Diesel_Generator_p/agc50.htm
50 KW of continuous output for $13K. I made no attempt to find the cheapest one available just grabbed one from a familiar company from the top of the queue. You could buy 3 of them and have backed up continuous 50 KW of power and $300K to buy fuel for the next 25 yrs for just the purchase tab of this flopper.
Philip
Thanks for that information
Tonyb
My luck is good today. I just watched a trash can blow over. Fortunately it fell off of the road and not in front of the oncoming school bus. Don’t know if that windmill would have made it.
@tckev says:
“Built to the highest available standards!”
So was the Titanic.
Time to set a bunch of metal thieves loose on these bird-choppers…..
it’d be a wind-win situation…
If 50mph of wind can do that imagine what another 1987 style non-hurricane could do!
And that was a baby turbine. Here in Ontario Canada they are routinely erecting turbines from 300 to 500 feet high. (100 meters plus). This is easily checked by retrieving the latest wind turbine specifications — if you have doubts.
Let’s not forget Anthony has first timers showing up to his blog.
I deserve my abuse, but let’s welcome those that have yet to earn it.
MattS,
I see, that would be one or more PE with a revoked ticket in my book.
Then silly me, I’d expect the thing to stand up.
When I lived in Cornwall one night there were 120 MPH gusts in Falmouth! next day lots of trees down, sadly this was before the turbine epidemic, but there was one and it was just about the only thing not moving in the county!
One factor i never see mentioned for wind turbines is the range of cyclic resonances created by first, the wind swirling around the round tower, the induced turbulence of which is known to create cyclic resonances at certain wind speeds and relative to both the diameters of the tower and the actual materials used as well as the strength and thickness of the tower’s materials.
Then there are the induced cyclic frequencies from the blades which are a direct result of blade design, pitch at the time and rotational velocities.
As a number of these resonances may combine to reinforce one another at very specific wind speeds and blade rotational velocities there is a closed loop with rapidly rising intensity of resonances.
Generally the wind speed varies so much in seconds that the effect is very limited and very quickly moves out of the critical band so no effect is seen immediately.
However constant up and down cycling through this critical resonance band leads to fatigue accumulation in the structure until it finally fails in what seems to be quite mild conditions.
If the foundations are built into some hard rock then it is likely that the resonance band changes all over again as the foundations will also be involved in the the whole structure’s critical resonating and cyclic frequency fatigue band.
All of this is well known in the aviation industry in particular
I have heard of some kilometres of concrete Power poles, newly erected but with no wire strung on them just failing en-masse due to strong winds that induced the pole’s natural cyclic resonances, which undamped by the wire, fatigued the concrete poles overnight. When the crews arrived to string the poles they found the lot as just shattered lumps of concrete from the overnight winds.
Piston engines of every type have this particular resonance problem which will lead to the rapid destruction of the engine but engines generally are designed to operate outside of the critical resonance range so the public are unaware of the problem.
Some piston aircraft engines operate each side of this critical resonance RPM range and you simple don’t operate those engines inside of that narrow critical RPM range .
In my previous comment @8:43 am the wind farm is near Ellensburg, WA in rural Kittitas county, here are Lat./Long.:
47.011926, -120.200232
Regarding concrete for wind towers, I suspect there are different designs.
On a tour of the one above we were told (I think) that the 28 foot steel rods were in concrete that deep except for the foot or so needed to go through the tower’s base. The area is on a rock ridge with no soil depth. In the photos below (not my local site) it appears they wanted a not-so-deep broader base rather than a taller deeper can-shaped plug.
here is one:
http://www.blitztransport.com/GALLERY22.html
Another image of putting nuts on rods:
Another set of photos:
http://www.blm.gov/extras/windslides/index.html
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RHS says:
January 30, 2013 at 8:51 am
“I’ve always been surprised they don’t use a guide/guy wire at least part way up”
First, wires could not go up very far because the top turns and the blades have to pass through the space.
Second, for the ones I mentioned, the inside ladder to the top and instruments are all attached to the tower by magnets because the design does not allow for holes/bolts and such. Those with metal implants (pacers or ICDs) are not allowed to go inside the tower.
Somewhere, somehow another of their wind turbines will have to run for 47 years to maintain the average lifetime.
50 kw installed for£250,000. Taking the capacity factor(kindly) at 1/3 that represents more than 20 times the capital cost per kw- hour generated of a combined cycle gas turbine. And as this article shows, a far higher maintenance cost and a much shorter operational life. I know it’s been said ad nauseam, but these beasts run on subsidies, which drives energy costs up for everyone, and drives industry away to China. What folly!
The real point here is the confirmation of extreme weather caused by AGW, without which the wind tower would have had a long and productive life. 😉
Back in 1965, at the UK’s Central Electricity Generating Board’s HQ, I got a report on my desk that cooling towers at the you-beaut super-duper Selby power station had been wind-tunnel tested to withstand 200 mph (320 kph) gales. That night, three fell down in much more modest winds, with three deaths. It turned out that the tests had been done with a model of a single tower, no consideration had been given to the intensifying effect of a cluster of towers, something which everyone in high-rise cities experiences often. Had the wind-millers done due diligence?
Something is realy wrong here.
The force due to wind is proportional to the square of the velocity.
If you take the ratio of 116/50 squared, you will realize that the failure occurred at less than 1/5 the force it was supposed to be designed to handle.
I’m sure if one had an opportunity to look closely at the failure there would be strong leads as to where the failure initiated.
For the failure to occur at such a large factor below the design there must be something unconventional such as a low temperatures caused a brittle failure, because the welds or the steel was not suitable for the low temperatures. This was actually a factor in the sinking of the Titanic. Of course there are other possible reasons but it is hard to believe that something basic was undersized by a factor greater than 5.
Evidently an erectile dysfunction.