Does anyone know why the high rate of non-spinning turbines on Upper Midwest wind farms?
Where are a couple of wind farms that have been built recently in northern Iowa and Southern Minnesota. Each of them is about 50-75 turbines. Every time we drive by, there are several of the turbines that aren’t spinning. If 3 out of 50 aren’t working at any given time, that’s a noticable percentage of your potential energy not being produced. I’ve driven past 2 of these farms every other week, for the last 2 months. I can’t find a pattern to which of the turbines are stopped, and yesterday one was slowing to a stop as we drove by.
A. Routine maintenance
B. The other nearby turbines are using up too much wind, causing a wind deficit, or dniw, which causes an immense vacuum to slowly spread to adjacent turbines causing them to slow and eventually stop.
This is interesting, I’d never heard of that. Don’t they attempt to compensate for that by spacing these turbines far enough apart so that doesn’t occur?
Around here, the usual reason is that the turbines have failed mechanically and they’re too expensive to repair. So, they stand there motionless, waiting for someone to replace the machinery with modern equipment.
Along the Altamont Pass, there are clusters of what were experimental designs - evidently there were a few duds, and there are simply no spare parts as the windmills were one-off creations.
Another reason for non-running windmills is maintenance - if you want to generate 100 megawatts, and you know that it takes ten windmills to do this, do you plant ten windmills, then loose generating capacity when they need to be cycled out for maintenance, or do you plant twelve, so you can have ten percent of your generating capacity offline, but still produce 100% of your target power while any given two windmills are being worked on?
I don’t know if this applies to the Upper Midwest, but there was a story on NPR this morning about the fact that in Texas, wind turbines (e.g. around Abilene) are generating more electricity than the power lines (to Dallas-Fort Worth) can transmit. When the lines are at full capacity, the turbines shut down.
I’ve been told by folks who’ve been involved in the design and construction of some of those large windmills that they really don’t take advantage of winds above 30 MPH or so (or was it 25? been a while, can’t recall exactly), and that they can in fact be damaged by wind that exceeds their useful limit. After that, I supposed that shut-down windmills had either been damaged, or were purposely shut down to avoid being damaged.
That’s the design around Fond du Lac Wisconsin. The individual blades are longer than the silos are tall on farms. I think from what I read it’s a turbine by Vestas.
That story was just ending when my alarm radio clicked on this morining. Very odd to hear our little burg mentioned in the news for any reason. Prairie Home Companion’s coming to town, too! Yeehaw!
Several people have mentioned maintenance. Is there anyone who works in the field? It just seems odd (and uneconomical) that 5-10% of possible power generation is being lost at any given time, because of lack of maintanence on generators that have been installed in the last 3 years.
As for wind speed - wouldn’t that apply to all the generators, and not just a couple of them? These are farms of 50 identical windmills.
:smack:
Goddammit!
In this age of developing alternative sources of energy, and me knowing little about wind power, for instance, here I stand all green and ready to soak in knowledge and I get a whopper of a whoosh…by a fucking windmill topic, no less!
Gah to the lot of ya!
