Posted on 11/27/2018 3:07:03 AM PST by dennisw
It isn’t economical for the energy company to maintain at 100%. Costs for logistics, personnel and parts far outweigh the ROI on implementation.
There are thousands of these monstrosities littering the landscape and there aren’t enough technicians to maintain them. If you have a wind farm with 300 turbines and it takes maintenance of 2-3 times a year for one turbine, it could conservatively take up to 3 years to hit the entire wind farm. And that is estimating that each visit only takes a day. Add parts to the mix and it could be longer.
Of course this presumes that every turbine installed is perfect, without any flaws.
That looks like fun. When I was about 18, my aunt and uncle, a friend of their and I decided to do something similar for a weekend trip.
Jump in a car and get as far as we could but still be home on Monday for work.
The weather was really bad any direction but south. We started in Detroit and ended up in Gatlinburg, TN.
I was at the airport once and overheard a few young Delta employees. They were taking a weekend trip together. Destination unknown. They got free airfare so they were going to the first flight they could find with four empty seats.
Who believes government statistics on anything these days?
True that! But, according to the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez party, "You just pay for it" and it's free.
The solar panels delaminate don’t they?
Most wind farms, which pay landowners on average around $8,000 a year per turbine, have contracts with renewal clauses that stretch out to 50 or 60 years.
If Duke decides to shutter a power plant, including its wind farms, the company is committed to restoring the site to its previous state, she said.
Rather than go to war with wind energy, the thrust of the article is that it will die on it’s own. The thrust of the article is that wind energy is ......not sustainable.
One wonders about the existing arrays over many square miles. When the usable life is over or nearly over, who will fess up the money to remove the inoperable machines?
1) I would bet the part of the wind turbine that has the most wear and is the costliest to maintain is the part that automatically adjusts the angles of the blades to optimize throughput. Others have posted things that I'm sure have merit (i.e. the relative frailty of the poles they're mounted on) But I'd bet those fairly simple items (i.e. a big steel pole) are relatively cheap to replace and upgrade compared to the moving parts, especially the moving parts that depend on precision like I expect the automatic adjusting of the blade angles do. This is probably especially true if wind turbine blades are shaped using the same Bernoulli Principle as airplane wings and blades are made. Thus increasing the efficiency, but making the math of each adjustment more complicated.
2) When understanding any costs always follow the money. These things are heavily subsidized by government money. Government money often doesn't follow a logical path of efficiency. It often follows a path toward who can complain the most for needing the money.
Congratulations Wisconsin! Most green power companies raid the decommissioning fund and leave once that's gone, leaving all the very tall and very big wind turbines standing abandoned and beyond repair.
And who will removed the 500 tons of concrete underneath each of them??
I grew up around the hydropower industry. The units are like the old steam engines. Huge bearings, equally huge castings, massive oil filtering and supply, constant cooling. Even the wicket gates are made this way. There is a little plant up near Chelan Falls, Washington that had been in continuous operation since at least the 20s I think and only recently went through a rebuild.
Wind turbines can’t have the same cooling or massive components. The blades flex constantly and the load on the connectors constantly oscillates from positive to negative as the the blades rotate.
I wonder how these composite / plastic blades hold up compared to similar airplane wings? Time will tell. We will find out.
Since the wind doesn't alway blow, Mills must always have a backup source to provide electricity in still times.
Yet, those costs are not allocated to 'wind power' when gov't makes these calculations....
BUT....you can be sure that YOU are billed for these costs by the utility!!!!!
***the useful life of a wind turbine is only 20 years.***
Our local coal fired power plant is now in it’s 40th year of running. It goes through a rebuild every few years but it is still running.
We see both damaged blades and repaired/new blades being trucked on the loop around our town on a frequent basis. One truck even missed a turn and wound up downtown; that was an afternoon of chaos! '-)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
BUT -- when you consider that without huge government subsidies wind turbines are a losing proposition -- maintaining them for a long lifetime makes zero economic sense.
It is a real privilege to have the means to do it...
If I were an airline attendant and single, I would do that in a heartbeat!
They may look only 50’ high, but - -
Industrial wind turbines are a lot bigger than ones you might see in a schoolyard or behind someone’s house. The widely used GE 1.5-megawatt model, for example, consists of 116-ft blades atop a 212-ft tower for a total height of 328 feet. The blades sweep a vertical airspace of just under an acre.
Yea, I was on some business trip and was feeling very envious. Sounds like fun to just hop on a plane and see where it lands.
My company just modified our time off procedures from vacation and sick days to a personal time off model. Since I rarely take sick days, I just got an extra week of vacation and next year I reach enough seniority to get four weeks.
Some of my volunteer activities burns vacation time so the extra time is going to be really helpful. Maybe we’ll do a boondoggle
During my last trip to the Rochester, NY area, the southern tier is home to the foothills of the Poconos and most hilltops have windmills on them - about 20% or so are still, and not slued to face the wind, while others turn.......
“A good article on the operation and maintenance costs and lifespan of a turbine.”
(https://www.wind-energy-the-facts.org/operation-and-maintenance-costs-of-wind-generated-power.html)
I’m more educated now and as a result am less inclined to have conspiracy theories.
Consider also that windmills are subject to the fickle winds and only operate producing electricity over a narrow range of wind speeds. If the wind speed is too low it won’t turn the massive blades and if too high the blades must be shut down or the windmill will destroy itself. While coal and nuclear plants do not run 100% of the time over their lifespan and must periodically be shut down for maintenance, their average running time is far higher that wind farms. I have often driven by vast wind farms that stretch literally from horizon to horizon and have seen every windmill idle.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.