From The Telegraph
Britain’s wind farms are wearing out far more rapidly than previously thought, making them more expensive as a result, according to an authoritative new study.
By Robert Mendick, Chief Reporter
8:40AM GMT 30 Dec 2012
The analysis of almost 3,000 onshore wind turbines — the biggest study of its kind —warns that they will continue to generate electricity effectively for just 12 to 15 years.
The wind energy industry and the Government base all their calculations on turbines enjoying a lifespan of 20 to 25 years.
The study estimates that routine wear and tear will more than double the cost of electricity being produced by wind farms in the next decade.
Older turbines will need to be replaced more quickly than the industry estimates while many more will need to be built onshore if the Government is to meet renewable energy targets by 2020.
The extra cost is likely to be passed on to households, which already pay about £1 billion a year in a consumer subsidy that is added to electricity bills.
The report concludes that a wind turbine will typically generate more than twice as much electricity in its first year than when it is 15 years old.
The report’s author, Prof Gordon Hughes, an economist at Edinburgh University and a former energy adviser to the World Bank, discovered that the “load factor” — the efficiency rating of a turbine based on the percentage of electricity it actually produces compared with its theoretical maximum — is reduced from 24 per cent in the first 12 months of operation to just 11 per cent after 15 years.
The decline in the output of offshore wind farms, based on a study of Danish wind farms, appears even more dramatic. The load factor for turbines built on platforms in the sea is reduced from 39 per cent to 15 per cent after 10 years.
Prof Hughes said in his conclusion: “Adjusted for age and wind availability, the overall performance of wind farms in the UK has deteriorated markedly since the beginning of the century.
“In addition, larger wind farms have systematically worse performance than smaller wind farms.”
The study also looked at onshore turbines in Denmark and discovered that their decline was much less dramatic even though its wind farms tended to be older.
Prof Hughes said that may be due to Danish turbines being smaller than British ones and possibly better maintained.
He said: “I strongly believe the bigger turbines are proving more difficult to manage and more likely to interfere with one another.
“British turbines have got bigger and wind farms have got bigger and they are creating turbulence which puts more stress on them.
“It is this stress that causes the breakdowns and maintenance requirements that is underlying the problem in performance that I have been seeing.”
Prof Hughes examined the output of 282 wind farms —about 3,000 turbines in total — in the UK and a further 823 onshore wind farms and 30 offshore wind farms in Denmark.
The report, published last week by the Renewable Energy Foundation (REF), a think tank that has campaigned against wind farms, will give ammunition to sceptics, especially within the Conservative Party, who believe the cost of subsidies to the wind industry is far too high and that the growing number of turbines are blighting the countryside.
Dr John Constable, the director of REF, said: “This study confirms suspicions that decades of generous subsidies to the wind industry have failed to encourage the innovation needed to make the sector competitive.
“Bluntly, wind turbines onshore and offshore still cost too much and wear out far too quickly to offer the developing world a realistic alternative to coal.”
HT/Alan Tomalty
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Bird choppers.
Bat life suckers.
Radio transmitters. At height.
Doppler radar confusers.
I’m thinking that worms and snakes are also effected.
These ugly monsters are a detriment to this planet and should be recycled into something useful.
JoNova had a piece awhile back stating that sea salt caused erosion of the blades of off shore units resulting in premature failure.
http://joannenova.com.au/2018/02/wind-farm-blades-damaged-after-just-a-few-years-at-sea-hundreds-need-repair/
Another “green” dream that doesn’t live up to the hype.
One Socialist’s dream is another Libertarian’s nightmare !
The report concludes that a wind turbine will typically generate
more than twiceless than half as much electricity when it is 15 years old than when it is new.There, fixed the obvious word-smithing for ’em.
False payback for solar energy will be the next shoe to drop.
Greedy pseudo scientists, stupid politicians for devices, at best, are 30% efficient. A useless blot on the landscape, and even more stupid to place in saltwater.
The devil mus t be laughing.
How in the world this “Green Energy” subsidy gravy train just keeps steaming along despite all these reports…. Is truly astounding. It makes no sense.
Why are we looking at a 2012 report?
Don’t we have anything more recent?
https://dailycaller.com/2018/12/27/study-wind-power-declining/
Back in the days of the Central Electricity Board (CEGB) here in the UK we used to grit blast the steam turbine blades to remove deposit buildup on the the blades which reduced aerodynamic efficiency. Today, I believe this is done with water as a carrier, with or without abrasives. This is a very similar situation to that of offshore wind turbines where very high wind velocities are experienced, particularly in the blade tip areas in an atmosphere of water particles laced with abrasive salt.
The result, however is the inverse of the problem of deposit buildup as material is removed from the blades. A very different matter to rectify.
Talking of proposals to produce floating wind turbines fills me with forebodings as the stresses due to wave movement on the heavy structures will have to be designed for additionally to the others into the bearing configuration. This factor is standard in ship shaft bearing design.
It can be done; but, again, we poor consumer proles will have to bear the cost.
This is just the beginning of these farms becoming near worthless to completely worthless. Don’t be surprised if you see these defunct farms sitting idle for years as the wind energy scam is realized and subsidies dry up.
http://texaslawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Stripling95.pdf
They were completely worthless even before they were built. They don’t produce on demand, dispatchable electricity and are therefore worthless. Absent government subsidies and mandates, not a single “wind farm” or “solar farm” for that matter, would have ever been built.
And that’s the big reason my GE stock is in the toilet.
Not “…more rapidly than previously thought…” unless the thought was from fantasy land, or the claims of the shameless promoters that foisted these monstrosities upon the rate payers. They’re wearing out almost exactly as fast as realistic assessments by competent engineers said they would. (I may exaggerate, I haven’t seen the reports from the engineers, but somewhere there is a gear and bearing designer that did his homework, and I would bet his results weren’t far off.)
The more I comment the more cynical I sound. But if my dismal thoughts are proven correct time and again, is it really cynical?
MTBF for the gearboxes: seven years. That’s one opinion.
MTBF numbers can be misleading. As an example a part can have a MTBF rating of 1 million hours. Another part a MTBF rating of 500,000 hours. When both are used together the MBTF rating is halved on the lowest rating IIRC, so in this example the MBTF would be 250,000 hours. It gets even worse for electrical and electronic systems.
Given these turbines appear to be “made to a price” I can understand why this study finds the operational life of these turbines is drastically reduced.
I did post IIRC. However the point I make stands.
I did a bit of this stuff about 30 years ago. Not an expert. But lets see if my aging memory can conjure up a answer.
MTBF is not an ideal metric for this, but given no other information, I think one would probably assume that MTBF = 1/(Probability of Failure). So MTBFsystem = 1/(1/MTBF1 +1/MTBF2) = 1/(1/1000000 + 1/500000) = 1/(0.000001 +0.000002) =333333 hr.
In reality MTBF is NOT usually the reciprocal of failure probability. Failures typically have a “bathtub curve”. A number of early life failures due to manufacturing/assembly problems. Then a (often long) period of random failures. … Then stuff starts to wear out.
+ 1
You also have to keep the turbine moving to prevent the axle developing a bow under the weight.
I am shocked.
Speechless. Dumbfounded. Gob Smacked. Incredulous.
…
…
…
(OK, maybe I was a little ‘less than honest just then, this IS The Interwebz here)
Do you REALLY mean to say those things actually last as long as all THAT!!??
wow
Cue the “those are the old generation…the new generation last so much longer” claims.
While reports of the operational vulnerabilities of wind farms has been generally suppressed by MSM, has anyone noticed that this story is dated 2012?
Well, who’da guessed it? Sometimes it really is “worse than we thought”.
And yet it always seems to be the enviro-greenpigs who discover they know less than regular, disinterested, engineers and real scientists who don’t blather on about global warming. Policymakers really should begin to start drawing the obvious conclusions.
Read many sales brochures, Big T?
Once again skeptics are proven correct:
Wind power is an expensive terrible failure.
Once again the climate consensus is proven to have forced a terrible costly failure and forced the public to pay for it.
And the wind power has made not one bit of difference on the climate… except for the financial climate of the wind power promoters.
After seeing that this report was from 2012, 6 years ago, I wondered if something more recent is available. A number have pointed to a 2018 article making the unlikely claim that the wind itself has dropped 30%. (This is nonsense. It is probably an officially sanctioned excuse for deterioration in the global wind turbine fleet.)
So I decided to look on Google Scholar for academic or technical articles on wind turbine reliability. And I discovered a curious thing. I entered as search term “wind turbine reliability” and looked at the first 200 articles that were delivered (20 pages, 10 per page).
What I found was that articles giving direct data on wind turbine reliability and breakdown numbers, stopped abruptly at about 2012. Before then, lots of papers, after 2012, nothing. By time I got past 100 papers, they were already drifting off the topic of direct reliability numbers, into specific technical matters.
There was a single 2015 paper looking at poor reliability stats of wind in China, but attributing this to specific (and none too complimentary) Chinese issues.
There was one paper from 2016 giving reliability data from offshore and onshore wind turbines, but with the data not summarised in a transparent way, quite a deep look was needed to find the numbers. And in any case, it looked mostly at turbines less than 5 years old so was not very useful for long term reliability.
https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/54141/1/Carroll_etal_WE_2015_Failure_rate_repair_time_and_unscheduled_O_and_M_cost_analysis_of_offshore.pdf
FWIW, here’s what it found. For numbers of total failures, minor and major combined, per year, were the following:
Offshore: 1 / year
Onshore: 1 / 8 years
(Figure 11).
It seems that a silence has descended in the open literature on wind turbine reliability. Google Scholar is quite good at finding papers if they’re online as confirmed in independent tests, competing well with even some quite expensive academic search engines.
Why this silence, one wonders!
Tasfay, thanks for attempting to find more recent data on the failure rate of wind turbines used to generate electricity. It is indeed curious that such data has tapered off so greatly since 2012.
However, your “numbers of total failures” given in your second-to-last paragraph do not seem to make sense: these numbers are incredibly low if they are indeed the number of failures for all deployed, operating wind turbines around the world (in excess of 100,000?). If this is not what you intended to say, then one needs to know the number of turbines that were considered to arrive at the yearly failure rates you stated.
Gordon
The numbers I were quoted were the total of all interventions including major and minor faults, and replacements. So no – this would indeed be too high for total failures. You can check figure 11 in the linked paper for more details.
I have a ‘bee in my bonnet’ about this – which I will air now . . .
A colleague was reviewing the foundation design for a 2MW wind turbine. Out of curiosity, I casually asked whether the governing design criterion was ultimate stability, and was told that it was. (“What else could it be?”) I then asked if there were any criteria for limiting movement (or tilting) of the tower under normal service conditions. I was told that there weren’t any.
The people who design the turbine must assume the tower is a perfect cantilever – i.e. that the foundation block is rigidly set into the ground and it will not allow tilt (rotation) of even 1% of one degree at ground level. But based on what I was told, this assumption is not checked or validated – and there is no such thing as “rigid” in real life.
So when the wind blows, the tower could actually be flexing or tilting far more than assumed.
Now the turbine rotor must act like a big gyro. Once it is comfortably rotating in a vertical plane, it is somewhat resistant to being tilted – even by a fraction of a degree. But it is constantly being tilted back-and-forth the whole time, and this must place variable stresses on the bearings and shaft.
Now, I hope it is reasonable to assume that the wind-turbine designers will have already taken this into account. But if they have assumed that the base of the tower is rigidly set into the ground (which is actually impossible), then they could have *grossly* underestimated these bearing and shaft stresses.
Now consider an offshore wind-turbine. I have had nothing to do with the design of these, but I do know (from journal literature) that most of the ones around the UK are mounted on a ‘monopile’ – i.e. a single large-diameter steel tube driven into the seabed. And I wonder where do the designers assume the effective level of rigid fixity’ to be? It would be stupid to assume it is at sea-level. It would also be stupid to assume the level of rigid fixity is at sea-bed level – because the sea-bed consists of soft marine sediments.
Those monopile-mounted offshore wind turbines must sway around like tall coconut trees! And, due to the gyroscopic resistance of the rotor, the stresses on the bearings and shaft must be enormous.
That is but one source of bearing side load. The blade weight is another, chomping through an adjacent turbines wake turbulence is another as is blades entering and leaving the boundary layer close to the ground/sea where the wind speed is less.
Most of the (infra) sound comes from wake turbulence hitting the support post.
Modern turbines are gearboxless using multipole generators rectified to DC, then inverted up to AC to feed the grid.
Some of the links to offshore farms are HVDC
All this had eliminated gearbox failure but not bearing failure.
There has long been a massive discrepancy between capacity factor as claimed by the government and green lobby organizations and capacity factors as calculated using actual output of wind farms feeding the UK grid.
(https://gridwatch.org.uk)
I believe there is tacit acceptance now at high government levels that wind power is not worth subsidizing, and measures are in place to make it less profitable.
It does not say what part of the structures is wearing out. I would guess that the generator wears out long before the rotor and the tower structure, and it would be interesting to know which part is the most valuable. May be it is just to replace a not so expensive generator.
What is the speed of the tip of a large blade? What is the designed rpm of the main shaft connected to the air blades? What is the rpm of the generator shaft? What is the force applied as torque to the shaft by the blade? How much turbulence is caused by the tower of the structure itself? How many large ( greater than 100meters tall ) turbines are installed now onshore and offshore in the USA vs Europe vs the rest of the world? Does a commercial wind farm represent anything other than wishful thinking? Now or in the future 20 years.8
RM Yeah, fair enough, but we don’t have to wait to 2100 to appraise the analysis. Moreover, the biased enthusiasts on the other side are free to do their check analysis and from their original estimates, apparently we may have to dial those back for real costs of renoobles.
There is a good message in your critique. Look into both sides of the arguments. Shoddy work by sceptics gets a hammering here as well.
Reality vs the cult of CAGW Care Bear evaluation, real costs/real issues and actual CO2 emission reduction as opposed to engineering/accounting malpractice.
1. The operating costs for wind turbines doubles after 15 years. At that late point in the asserts life cycle additional costs to keep the wind turbine operating likely cannot be justified as there are hard end of life asset issues, around 20 years, for supports and/or blades.
2. Many of the wind turbines are located in locations where there is insufficient average wind power. The minimum average utilization required, in the US to make a wind project viable even with generous subsides, is around 35% average. Compare that to Germany with an actual average wind utilization rate of 17.4%.
3. With a utilization factor of less than 20%, 100% ‘green’ energy gets 20% average ‘reduction’. To go pass the 20% ‘reduction requires storage.
4. The green savings does not include the reduction in grid efficiency which is around 10% (half of the 20% savings). The green savings is not reduced by the energy cost to construct the green thing, including grid upgrades.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/22/shocker-top-google-engineers-say-renewable-energy-simply-wont-work/
Germany Energiewend Leading To Suicide By Cannibalism. Huge Oversupply Risks Destabilization
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/02/08/weekly-climate-and-energy-news-roundup-167/
http://notrickszone.com/2015/02/04/germanys-energiewende-leading-to-suicide-by-cannibalism-huge-oversupply-risks-destabilization/#sthash.8tE9YRDj.PSllYaQF.dpbs
Government subsidies always suppress innovation. They never encourage it.