Bloomberg Business Week, no foe of green energy, headlines: “Wind Turbines Taller Than the Statue of Liberty Are Falling Over.”
The article beneath the headline reports on a variety of alarming disasters involving wind turbines, including collapses of very tall structures. [emphasis, links added]
On a calm, sunny day last June, Mike Willey was feeding his cattle when he got a call from the local sheriff’s dispatcher. A motorist had reported that one of the huge turbines at a nearby wind farm had collapsed in dramatic fashion. Willey, chief of the volunteer fire department in Ames, 90 miles northwest of Oklahoma City, set out to survey the scene.
The steel tower, which once stood hundreds of feet tall, was buckled in half, and the turbine blades, whose rotation took the machine higher than the Statue of Liberty, were splayed across the wheat field below. The turbine, made by General Electric Co., had been in operation less than a year. “It fell pretty much right on top of itself,” Willey says.
Another GE turbine of the same model collapsed in Colorado a few days later. That wind farm’s owner-operator, NextEra Energy Inc., later attributed it to a blade flaw and said it and GE had taken steps to prevent future mishaps. A spokesperson for GE declined to say what went wrong in both cases in a statement to Bloomberg.
The instances are part of a rash of recent wind turbine malfunctions across the US and Europe, ranging from failures of key components to full collapses.
The article blames the “rash” of incidents on the rush to install turbine capacity, but there are also permanent factors that make engineering, building, and maintaining wind farms difficult and risky.
To develop meaningful amounts of power, the blades on the turbine have to be big, and when big blades spin in heavy winds, the tips can end up hitting supersonic speeds, putting great stress on the materials used to construct them.
Big blades also require tall towers, which are then subject to stresses as winds blow and can gust during storms to velocities that test the strength of the materials and the design of the towers.
And, of course, tall string towers require a lot of construction materials that have (ahem) a considerable carbon footprint to create.
Compared to the amount of “carbon-free” electricity generated, the carbon emitted in the manufacturing and construction of the towers may take many years to counterbalance.
Consider that the relatively low-electricity production of each tower (compared to a coal or nuclear-fired plant) means that far more power transmission lines must be constructed, and there is a carbon footprint involved, not to mention the excess demand created for copper, which has its own environmental issues in mining and refining, and the problems with meeting demand when creating new copper mines hit a high wall of resistance from the very same environmentalists who think windmills are a solution to the problems they imagine CO2 creates.
But with wind farms, longevity is an issue. The unpredictable nature of winds, with the speed and direction changing abruptly, means that complex transmission boxes must be attached to each turbine, and these transmission boxes are stressed when high winds occur and suddenly change direction.
They need maintenance crews at the ready. In my consulting days, I encountered a wind farm project whose transmission boxes regularly exploded when sudden gusts of wind overstressed them, creating their own mini-environmental disasters from the transmission fluids spewing onto the ground.
All of these problems are in addition to the fundamental problem with wind energy: it is unreliable. When the wind doesn’t blow, you get no electricity, so you still need backup generating power at the ready, and that usually involves carbon-based fuels, since constructing nuclear plants is so rare these days.
Then there are all the millions of birds, including the federally protected bald eagles, that are killed each year by windmills.
Wind farms, in other words, are one of the worst options for providing electricity.
Top image via YouTube screen grab.
Read more at American Thinker
Part of my career as an aerospace engineer was spent in structures. The main emphasis was to test the aircraft’s ability to hold up to thousands of repeated stress loads over the life time of the air craft. It is obvious in their rush to get the wind towers up this testing was either completely skipped or inadequate. This is nothing less than reckless.
Wind power has one tenth the energy density as solar power. I’m sure the only reason wind power exists is even the technically challenged politicians know that solar power is available at best 50% of the time on the average, where wind can be blowing any time during the day or night. However, when it is extremely hot or extremely cold the air tends to be still. So wind power fails when it is needed the most.
Hi David, it’s good to hear from a man who knows what he’s talking about.
You mentioned extreme weather and I’m particularly interested in the effects of cold on renewables equipment. Being a retired lubrication specialist from the oil industry, I know that big machines must be warmed up before put into service. In many northern hemisphere applications, large gear sets, conveyors, hydraulic systems (for example) have heaters to warm the massive oil volume in the return tanks to prevent mechanical failure caused by lack of lubrication. (Oil runs thick and slow when cold) These heater setups are powered by electricity and in windturbines, that would have to come from the grid and not the turbine, because of it’s potential to be on and off, depending on when the wind is blowing.
My point is that there are many reasons never revealed by the media that would demostrate, without question, why windturbines are a very bad idea for generating electricity for grids with high demands. A single coal power station solves so many problems and they certainly don’t just fall over.
Colin,
I really appreciated your post. Basic physics tells us that oil gets thicker when it gets cold, but I didn’t know that in some applications it needed to be heated before the machinery could be used. The great thing about this web site is the people commenting include those with a lot of knowledge. There are people from and the oil/gas industry and farmers that provide real world experience.
A few less Bird Choppers the better it is
Agree and good to know but if we have no politicians that will do something about it nothing happens to go back to what works.
Joseph, the problem is that the politicians are among the most ignorant adults around and they are surrounded by people who either don’t know the truth or if the do they won’t tell the politicians. And many of the so-called scientists and engineers pushing this cr@p are paid too well to be honest.
An excellent synopsis of the situation. You forgot to mention the climate lies this is justfied by are similarly disproven by the realities of observation, we now know what actually happens to better precision than ever , so can predict with some accuracy, versus guessing using science fiction models.