Story by Eric Worrall –
![wind_turbine_bearings[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/wind_turbine_bearings1.jpg?quality=83)
A few years ago, I used to know a senior wind turbine engineer. One evening, over a few beers, he told me the dirty secret of his profession:
“The problem is the bearings. If we make the bearings bigger, the bearings last longer, but making the bearings larger increases friction, which kills turbine efficiency. But we can’t keep using the current bearings – replacing them is sending us broke. What we need is a quantum leap in bearing technology – bearing materials which are at least ten times tougher than current materials.”
At the time there was very little corroborating online material available to support this intriguing comment – but evidence seems to be accumulating that bearings are a serious problem for the wind industry.
Siemens citing bearing failures as part of the reason for a substantial fall in profit;
http://www.offshorewind.biz/2014/05/07/siemens-energy-division-profit-down-54-pct/
In the announcement of the opening of a new Siemens research facility;
http://www.greenoptimistic.com/2013/03/19/siemens-wind-turbine-research/
“… The Brande test center would evaluate the main parts of their wind turbines such as main bearings …”
http://www.geartechnology.com/newsletter/0112/drives.htm (an attempt to make direct drive turbines, to reduce bearing wear)
“… More accurately, it is typically the bearings within the gearbox that fail, in turn gumming up the gearbox, but that’s a story for another time. …”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burbo_Bank_Offshore_Wind_Farm
“… During summer 2010 Siemens decided to change the blade bearings on all 25 turbines as a pre-emptive measure after corrosion was found in blade bearings found on other sites. …”
Of course, there is the occasional video of catastrophic turbine failure;
Suggestions the industry is trying to conceal the scale of the turbine fire problem;
All of which creates an interesting question – just how much of our money is the government prepared to waste, to keep their wind dream afloat? If the costs are far greater than the industry admits, how long is the wind industry going to carry that additional hidden cost, before they try to push the costs onto taxpayers, or abandon wind technology altogether?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2116877/Is-future-Britains-wind-rush.html
In regard to BJ’s As a non-constant producer of energy, ways of storing excess energy production will be required over time. This is coming.
Read the post and thread: “Getting Energy From The Energy Store” Eschenbach, WUWT, June 29, 2013.
– How Edison found 50 ways NOT to make a battery.
– Cost of Batteries per kWhr stored. If you amortize the cost of the battery per 1000 recharge cycles, you wind up paying $1 per kWhr stored. This translates to an energy equivalent gasoline cost of $33.7 / gallon.
– “Hiroshimas” as a unit of energy = 60 TeraJoules = 18 GWhr. = 3.5 hr supply for New York City.
– – – when a battery stores that much energy shorts out, you get a Hiroshima release of energy (before the battery itself starts burning!)
– Pumped Storage, now little it get’s you.
– Ice Storage Air Conditioning, a version of pumped storage equivalent to raising water 34,000 m into the sky.
So it’s the design of the bearings that are the issue?
Then redesign the wind turbine so that the blades are horizontal rather than vertical.
If the forces in the bearings are differently arranged I am sure the wear issue can be mitigated.
It’s odd that they are not designed that way already. No need to rotate the blades into the wind if they are horizontal so that should make the design less complex with fewer moving parts.
ralfellis August 26, 2014 at 8:35 am
David L. Hagen August 26, 2014 at 7:27 am
The Billion-Dollar Bet On Jet Tech That’s Making Flying More Efficient.
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The geared fan concept for jet engines….
Alternatively, you could buy a Rolls Royce Trent. Rolls have been making a twin-shaft aero-engine design for decades, which more accurately match the fan-speed with turbine-speed.
First to David – All good points but you also need to include loading factors. In our senior design class, talking about ‘Safety Factors’, we were informed that a car jack could often have component SF = 6, whereas a jet plane could have component SF=2. Because loads were weighted and maximum loads controlled on the plane and unknown on the car jack.
Ralfellis – Are they back?
Fan blades for the RB211-22B were of ‘Hyfil’, a carbon fibre reinforced epoxy. The blades were of a new wide-chord design pioneered by the company to reduce the number of blades necessary, and hence cut noise.
Unfortunately, Rolls-Royce had problems with the RB211, a number of these being associated with the composite blades, which lacked, in particular, adequate bird strike resistance and manufacturing repeatability. Engineers had perhaps placed too much confidence in the use of a material which, at that time, was unproven for major rotating parts and, while they had a sound understanding of the material’s properties at laminate level, this did not extend into the highly dynamic environment of a fast-rotating component. The problem could not be solved in the time available and Rolls-Royce had to switch back to titanium blades. The RB211’s troubles contributed to the 1973 bankruptcy of the company.
One of my other professors worked on this engine, so we heard the stories.
ddpalmer
August 26, 2014 at 9:22 am
Considering that the article displayed a wind tower burning, that is a major point in the article despite the headline. The relative frequency as a cause of failure is of some import to the article: why else would the author highlight that particular hazard – by implication a result of bearing failures?
Wind turbines have been around for thirty years. I was inside one around twenty years ago. Though they have gotten more common the last ten years, wind turbines are not a new technology. With 200,000 turbines operating in the world (according to the article cited below the video), maintenance requirements would be well known to the industry and is therefore included in the anticipated costs associated with a wind energy project. This experience includes the costs associated with bearing failure, since bearings have been part of the wind turbine since the first.
Real time data from ERCOT:
Current Load: 50.8 GW at 8/26 12:05.
Total Load Forecast: 8/26/14 peak expected to be 65.0 GW at 17:00
http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/loadForecastVsActualCurrentDay.html
Total Generated from Wind: 0.102 GW at 8/26 12:00 (instantaneous)
http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/CURRENT_DAYCOP_HSL.html
Expected Wind Generation at 17:00 peak load: 1.2 GW (2% of demand).
Chris4692 – your comment is a lovely piece of mis-direction or faulty logic; I can’t decide which. The point under discussion is -bearing failure-, or speaking more broadly, wind turbine failure rates. Your attempt to equate failure with ‘catching on fire’ is, either disingenuous, or stupid. Your call.
Perhaps this statement will make the flaw clear for you:
Very few people catch on fire and die, so it’s obvious that very few people die.
Get the power to the meter.
Current wind energy in the Wash-Oregon area went to near zero yesterday morning and remains there:
http://transmission.bpa.gov/Business/Operations/Wind/baltwg.aspx
Very light winds expected for another 24 hours.
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Ric Werme August 26, 2014 at 8:50 am
Regarding the link you provided:
Thanks for that, very interesting.
When we arrived at our current home in 1989 there was an abandoned vertical-axis machine (about 80 feet tall) on a hill about 20 miles west of us. Note the word abandoned. It is still there. Now, many modern wind towers are nearby. I need to take some photos.
Another item:
About 1990 a college student I knew built a “simple drag vertical-axis wind turbine” that was about a meter high. He mounted it on a fence corner and ran a wire inside to his apartment. I don’t remember using the correct name (as above) – I think he called it a barrel generator. With a nice wind the contraption lit a small light inside that reminded me of the small gas light my Great Aunt had on her wall in the late 1940s. Her gas light made the wall paper dirty and at spring cleaning my sister and I could help with the pink putty like material (Absorene) to clean it off. In contrast, my friend’s barrel generator made light without the soot. It also made noise and vibrated itself to death.
In contrast, my hydro-powered all electric house has none of these problems.
CodeTech
“Wind” and other “renewables” are far more than simple technology challenges. They had significant money put into them in the 70s during the Energy Crisis, and were found to be useless.
IIRC wind to generate electricity was first tried in the late 19th century. Even though steam engines had long replaced wind as the prefered form of mechanical power.
Steam turbines are a vital part of electricity generation today.
Together with the internal combustion engines which have replaced steam engines, especially for vehicles.
Chris4692 August 26, 2014 at 9:07 am
That wind has to be backed up is not of major importance
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The greatest fantasy and delusion ever sold. Actually, intermittency is the greatest problem that (nearly) all renewables have.
Yes, fossil and nuclear power plants do have down-time. But downtime normally represents 5 or perhaps 10% of operating capacity, and it is normally scheduled 3 months in advance. And the schedule is devised so that only one generating set (out of perhaps 5 sets) is down at any one time in any one plant. In which case, there is no intermittency in conventional base-load power generation – that is why it is called base-load.
In comparison, wind can and will go off-line three times a day. And even with modern weather forecasting, we don’t have a clue when the next off-line period will be. And in total, these turbines will be off-line 75% of the time. And perhaps more importantly, they all go off together. If a large anticyclone sets up over the UK, all the wind turbines in NW Europe all go off-line together.
This is why wind power is so ‘f’ useless, and will bring entire nations and continents to their knees.
We cannot run industry or society, when the power goes off-line five days a week. And the only way to prevent that happening, is to have fossil or nuclear power on 24hr spinning standby. So what is the ‘f’ point in having wind power? It merely jacks up the price we pay five-fold, and threatens brownouts and blackouts as the grid tries to balance wind energy with the spinning-standby backup.
Renewable energy is the biggest confidence trick in the history of man, and I do hope the exponents of this con pay a severe legal penalty in future years and decades.
Ralph
RCM
August 26, 2014 at 10:16 am
Fire is apparently an important point to the author of the original piece otherwise it would not have been included so prominently. If there is misdirection or faulty logic, it is in the original post.
just so many issues with the drivetrains on these.
when no wind they suck energy from grid to rotate them to prevent bearing flat spots.
when rotating (generating) they have to make sure blade tips stay below supersonic or the vibrations cause blade and shaft issues. this also leads to bearing issues.
when really hot they need to be stopped, suck energy from grid to rotate due to lubrication issues.
when really cold they need to be stopped, suck energy from grid to rotate due to lubrication issues.
granted these 2 temp extremes are rare.
when wind direction changes the side loads on bearings and shafts are enormous and wind shears are worse.
when running they need a backup source online to take load when wind drops.
yeah…they are the future…
And here I was thinking that once we built these big eggbeaters we would be harvesting the wind free forever.
Gosh, who woulda thunk there are regular maintenance costs? Next thing we’re gonna find out is there is a service life on the turbines, the blades, the control systems, the electrical transmission wires, the transmission towers and the transformers. Jeepers, makes you think there might be service life and ROI considerations that maybe haven’t been publicly discussed?
BTW: /sarc
Yeah, you can always do something a bit technologically unbelievable & economically indefensible, if it is important enough to work out the challenges and meet the cost & hassle – if it puts a nice-enough feather in yer hat.
Submarines, fer instance, and then nuclear plants to run them. The tech is a pain (and the money is ridiculous), but the asset pushes us over the top, on a higher plane. Even economically justifiable choices are subject to similar philosophical calculus: Jet airliners … so important to ‘what we are’ (on that all-important “higher plane”) that serious actors insist we should leave ourselves open to a glaring Ebola-transmission vector, in order to keep them going.
Wind power should ‘obviously’ be approached as we do with hydroelectric: Create a structure that allows you to capture and corral the ‘wild’ energy phenomenon, and then direct a controlled amount of it through a throttling mechanism. To be reliable & economical, all machines must be designed & built to deal with a predictable, controllable range of forces, power & energy. Windmills don’t have dams, reservoirs or inlet controls.
You really need to build a fabulous, incredible “scoop” that catches a wide swath of wind to some designated altitude over, say, the Thames Estuary. The scoop needs louvers in front, so that powerful wild wind-storms can be mostly-blocked.
If we had a global electric power transmission grid with very high efficiency, if we had industrial superconductive systems that could also carry very high power, then in a globally-integrated network windmills would work ‘better’. However, long-range, high-efficiency transmission would also make several kinds of conventional electrical generation that can’t quite pencil out today, much more competitive … ie, cheaper.
concrete bases cracking.
https://www.wind-watch.org/documents/cracks-in-onshore-wind-turbine-foundations/
richardscourtney
Clearly, there are niche markets for wind turbines in some remote locations to this day where e.g. water needs to be pumped.
Water pumping not be that time critical. It may well not matter if it takes 1 or 5 hours to fill a cistern. But electricity available a minute before or after it is needed can be useless.
Edward Richardson,
Try this turn off all the other power generators and disconnect from the national grid.
Then see how much of the wind made electricty gets to the meters.
Alx
In buidling enterprise business systems, there is a concept called “total cost of ownership”, which includes the cost of building the system, and very importantly the cost of maintaining it annually.
At least that’s the idea. In practice it’s easy to wind up with all sorts of politcial “fudge factors” or components where cost estimages vary by orders of magnitude.
@Chris4692
If wind power is economically viable, nobody would be forced to buy it or subsidize it.
Mark
At August 26, 2014 at 10:53 am you say in total
Your selective quotation from my post at August 26, 2014 at 6:14 am is misleading. In fact, my post concluded by saying
If you want a full explanation of my views on these matters then please read this.
Richard
Sciguy54 said:
“And this is precisely the point that the greens do not want to admit: most green technologies are not yet proven to the point that life-cycle costs are known. Yet they want to place unproven technologies into mass production anyway.”
You nailed it. My favorite comment of the day.
When a government has the authority to direct resources at unproven endeavors and continues to do so without regard to results or accountability, that country is doomed.
Richard Ilfeld
Well, sure, if the wind towers get the monitoring and maintenance cycle of a jet. When you look at the operating hours TBO & to mandatory retirement vs the Windmill required life cycle, and the additions to an already absurd cost benefit ratio for wind. it, pardon the expression, won’t fly.
It’s quite possible that a wind turbine is subjected to a greater range of forces than a gas turbine engine. (Even on something like a V22.)
Also no pilot would repeatedly cycle between idle and TOGA. Which could correspond to gusty wind conditions.
There’s a good chance that a pilot would just refuse to fly a plane if the engine instrument readings were abnomal. (Even without an EICAS alert.)
No matter, the rate of change of solar cost reductions will leave them in a pile of bad bearings and other overhaul expenses soon enough.
Current “green” technologies are just as real as the hockey stick graph that made these “green” fraud operations possible in the first place.
A “cart load of dung” not in need of a horse.
Now that the bearings are [too] costly, cover up the earth with solar panels and live in the dark.