The gearbox: wind power's Achilles' heel

This month's Windpower Monthly examines a little-known twist in the "mature technology" of large-scale wind turbines:

Gearboxes have been failing in wind turbines since the early 1990s. Barely a turbine make has escaped. Six years ago the problem reached epidemic proportions, culminating in a massive series failure of gearboxes in NEG Micon machines. At the time, the NEG Micon brand was the most sold wind turbine in the world. The disaster brought the company to its knees as it struggled to retrofit well over one thousand machines. It has since been taken over by Vestas, the world's largest wind turbine manufacturer. Vestas is still grappling with the aftermath of the gearbox catastrophe.

The wind power industry and its component suppliers now believe that such major series failure of gearboxes is a thing of the past. Today's far larger and more sophisticated turbines, they say, are safe from mistakes encountered in early phases of technology development.

Bigger turbines, however, are proving to be far from immune to gearbox failure, as Windpower Monthly reports in its November issue. ...

The wind industry's gearbox problem has for years been shrouded in secrecy. While blame for the failures has been spread far and wide, questions outnumber the answers by far. At Windpower Monthly we set ourselves the task of finding out the true scale of the problem. Why is it that gearboxes in wind turbines have so massively failed? What is the solution? ...

The good news is that understanding of the highly complex loads that gearboxes -- and particularly their bearings -- are subject to is being helped by a new industry willingness to co-operate and face up to the challenges of wind power's rapid technological evolution. But only time will tell whether a definitive solution has been found -- and whether it will stay the course as wind turbines get ever bigger and more demanding of engineering ingenuity.

categories:  wind power, wind energy, wind turbines

Punishment

Here's a picture from the October 9 Watertown (N.Y.) Daily Times, of some of the approximately 150 turbines in Phase I of the Maple Ridge Wind Farm on Tug Hill in northern New York. A complete concrete plant was built just to provide for the massive foundations.


categories:  wind power, wind energy, wind farms, wind turbines

Wind barely better than nuclear

George Monbiot wrote in the October 25 Guardian (U.K.):

Ten cents of investment, [Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute] shows, will buy either 1 kilowatt-hour of nuclear electricity; 1.2-1.7 of windpower; 2.2-6.5 of small-scale cogeneration; or up to 10 of energy efficiency. "Its higher cost than competitors, per unit of net CO₂ displaced, means that every dollar invested in nuclear expansion will worsen climate change by buying less solution per dollar." And, because nuclear power stations take so long to build, it would be spent later. "Expanding nuclear power would both reduce and retard the desired decrease in CO₂ emissions."

It is notable that wind power is almost as bad an investment as nuclear power for reducing CO₂ emissions.

Note: I pointed this out, that wind was hardly better than nuclear, to Mr Monbiot, who has written an incisive critique of the "wind power madness" yet still supports it. His reply was, "20-70% hardly better? Try telling that to an economist." One hopes that some economists are better at math than this. The comparison in this analysis is to what ten cents could buy if best spent, namely, 10 KWh of energy efficiency, so that wind is only a 2-7% better investment for reducing CO₂ emissions than nuclear.

categories:  wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism

The Low Benefit of Industrial Wind

Driving the desire for industrial wind power is the conviction that its development is necessary to reduce the effects of fossil and/or nuclear fuel use. Thus the local impacts of large wind turbine installations are justified by a greater good of healthier air and water, reduction of global warming, and moving away from harmful mining and fuel wars. These are all without question important goals.

While the wind power industry tends to downplay its negative effects, many conservation groups call for careful siting and ongoing study to minimize them. There is debate, therefore, about the actual impacts, but there is none about the actual benefits. Even the most cautious of advocates do not doubt, for example, that "every kilowatt-hour generated by wind is a kilowatt-hour not generated by a dirty fuel."

That may be true for a small home turbine with substantial battery storage, but such a formula is, at best, overly simplistic for large turbines meant to supply the grid. The evidence from countries that already have a large proportion of wind power suggests that it has no effect on the use of other sources. This is not surprising when one learns how the grid works: A rise in wind power simply causes a thermal plant to switch from generation to standby, in which mode it continues to burn fuel.

Read the rest of the paper at: www.aweo.org/LowBenefit.pdf.

categories:  wind power, wind energy, wind farms, wind turbines, environment, environmentalism

Lying about bat kills

From the Winona (Minn.) Daily News, Oct. 23:

During a tour last month of Carleton College's 1.65 megawatt turbine in Northfield, Minn., project director Rob Lampa told a group of about 30 Winona County residents that the college had found no evidence of bird or bat kills in the first year of operating the 230-foot turbine [plus 135-foot blade radius], situated in a cornfield about 1 1/2 miles east of town.

As the group was leaving, Winona resident Marijo Reinhard pulled County Commissioner Dwayne Voegeli aside.

"Look," she said, pointing at the ground, where she had spotted a small, brown bat dead on the gravel below the slowly spinning turbine. A few feet away, she spotted another, also dead.

Lampa will have to make sure the clean-up crew does a better job before he gives the next tour!

categories:  wind power, wind energy, wind turbines, environment, environmentalism

Desire for wind turbines justifies killing

To the Editor, Providence (R.I.) Journal:

Jack Coleman (Opinion, Oct. 20), in citing two caveats from the Desholm and Kahlert study (Biology Letters, 2005) of geese and ducks flying around the off-shore wind facility near Nysted, Denmark, did not notice the most obvious limitations of the research: Monitoring was done only during fair weather and not during twilight. That is, it found a favorable outcome by restricting observation to favorable conditions.

Coleman then goes on to describe the toll of buildings, towers, cats, oil spills, soot, mercury, global warming, and habitat destruction on bird populations, as if that justifies the new mode of death he is advocating.

Of course he admits, apparently believing that opponents have never thought of it, that the new death toll "must be measured against the cost of failure to reverse climate change."

There he ends his opinion piece, simply implying that industrial wind turbines help mitigate global warming and thus save more birds that they kill, that they save more wildlife habitat than they degrade.

But that is precisely where the debate begins. Do large wind power facilities actually reduce the effects of fossil fuel use? Opponents look at the evidence -- instead of the industry's sales material -- and find that they do not. Therefore even the most downplayed impact is not justified.

categories:  wind power, wind energy, wind farms, wind turbines, environment, environmentalism

RPS makes it cheaper to pollute

An interesting analysis of the effects of a "renewable portfolio standard" (RPS) in New Jersey that would require 20% of the electricity sold in the state by 2020 to be from renewable sources was brought to our (National Wind Watch's) attention by Dan Boone, Conservation Chair of the Maryland Sierra Club.

The 206-page report was prepared in December 2004 by the Center for Energy, Economic, and Environmental Policy, Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, State University of New Jersey, for the Office of Clean Energy, New Jersey Board of Public Utilities, and is available as a 2-MB PDF at www.bpu.state.nj.us/reports/EIAreport.pdf.

One of the things it found, which is hidden deep inside the paper and completely absent from the summary, is that the RPS would have no effect on sulfur and nitrogen emissions except to make it cheaper to exceed current limits. The report notes that the Energy Information Agency of the U.S. Department of Energy came to the same conclusion about a national RPS. That is, the RPS would not reduce emissions and would benefit only the polluters, who would enjoy lower prices because of the greater supply of "green credits."

Only with correspondingly stricter caps on noxious emissions would this ironic effect be avoided. But then the RPS wouldn't be necessary. Politicians and their once-environmentalist supporters evidently prefer the easier path of imposing an RPS -- especially easy as it benefits polluter-donors more than our health and ecology, as long as the public believes we're all doing something grand to save the planet.

And so the market triumphs. Bad money drives out good.

categories:  wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism, anarchism