Wind Turbines

[powerdesal]

[quote user="Patmobile"][quote user="powerdesal"]Will,

[/quote]

As in "upwards of 50 years" and "expected service life of 25 years", perhaps?

Hoist on your own petard, I think.

Patrick
[/quote]

I dont think so, mine was a quote from something I read, not my own view. However, it would seem pretty obvious that it is impossible to quote a specific time period to recover lifetime costs when that period is in years, unless of course you have a pretty damned accurate crystal ball - I dont have. Similarly, expected service life is a perfectly acceptable engineering statement, again crystal ball factors come into it ( maintainance quality, weather damage, spares availability etc etc).

Comparison with my statement regarding power line losses is erroneous. Such losses are calculable and are historically documented.

The environmentalists who use such exagerrated figures to convince / frighten people are not doing justice to their cause. A reasoned, accurate, logical argument would better serve the purpose, and be more convincing.

 

ps, I believe its by your own petard not on - could be wrong, I am sure Mr Smith will know.  [:D]

[Dick Smith]

Yes, it's 'Hoist by your own petard', a petard being a small mortar-like cannon which had a nasty tendency to blow up and take the gunner with it. Shakespeare, Hamlet, I believe.

[SaligoBay]

Well, somebody in Aude really doesn't like them http://www.midilibre.com/actuv2/article.php?num=1164043981

The country is going to the dogs, non?  

[Jackie]

Well thanks to all for the many replies. I have passed on all information kindly given to interested parties. Reaction locally has been slow to get going but more folks are asking questions now, which is good. Having had a drive around the proposed location for these generators I have, with the aid of a map provided in the consultation documents, determined that most of us are at least 0.5km from the nearest one. There is one exception where they may be less than 400m away from the nearest tower. We ourselves, at the moment, are about 1.5km distant from the nearest but at a meeting the other day the answer to the question asking if the wind farm might grow in the future was skillfully avoided!.................J&J

[Jonzjob]

No one has mentioned, so far, the possibility of epilepsy? Due to the changing light from the rotating blades up to a couple of kilometers away these things can induce fits in responsive people. I was talking to a guy a short while back who's job in the U.K. is to check the envoironment around where these things are proposed and if there are any families who are receptive to this condition it is applied to the planning permission and they can be refused. BUT what if you buy a house in the area after they are there. Does anyone tell you this? I'll bet they don't know and if you were selling your house there would you tell, or would you even know to tell?

They work out over the course of a year to be about 30% eficient. 850Kw? As Steve said. They can not take over from power stations cause if the wind don't blow the windmill don't go. Yes they turn at very low wind speeds, but at 5 mph wind they produce next to nowt. They are stopped by feathering at wind speeds much over 60 mph and are also stopped if the wind gusts over a certain speed over the mean wind speed or it is veering over a certain amount, because the blades can't change their pitch to match the wind speed change and the rotor head can't change direction to match rapid wind direction changes.

We have an old wind farm just North of here by Salsigne. It is abandoned! There are 10 or so turbines, 2 bladed. Well some are. None of them turn, several have had complete blade disintergration, some of the rotors have fallen off, but nothing has been done to remove them. I wonder if this will be the fate of this modern wonder.

As you have probably guessed, I don't think they are worth the ground that they each have there olympic swimming pool sized concrete bases on. It has been proved in the States that they change the micro enviroment around them if they are in a large enough concentration and change ground temperature and the wind speed. One wind farm was responsible for killing about 40,000 bats over the course of a couple of years. There were a LOT of turbines, hundreds, but this is the way that the development is going if it is allowed to do so.

I had a window sticker in the U.K. In Stroud of all places and in my Citroen Dianne that said "Dark Ages, No Thanks! Atoms For Energy" and as long as ALL of the safety is in place it is one of the only ways to go. The very first way is not to need to produce ever more power, but TO USE LESS!!! 

[Russethouse]

FWIW - our local one is popular !

http://www.getreading.co.uk/news/2005/2005365/turbine_is_an_ecotriumph

but it is only one - I don't think there are plans to expand

[andyh4]

[quote user="powerdesal"]
I read the other day that it can take upwards of 50 years to recover the lifetime costs of a wind turbine, and they have an expected service life of 25 years !!!!!!!!   [8-)]
[/quote]

 

I am struggling to believe the 50 years Steve.

Judging by the way they are going up in my bit of Germany you would think the payback was closer to 5 years. 

This morning on my drive across the Hunsruck 6 turbines and a couple more masts have appeared in the space of 6 weeks.  2 more near us appeared last September, another 6 at the beginning of the summer, over 20 last year.........

I find it hard to believe that financial companies would invest in anything with a 2%pa ROI when they will get better than that at the bank.

[powerdesal]

Andy,

I will try to find the source of the 50 year info, it was some days ago and by some scientifficy chap.

I think the finance side of it is seriously distorted by grants etc which means that the exposure of any residual finance is very much less than the true project cost, hence the ROI is seriously biased and would be much greater than 2%. The bulk of the costs are inevitably met from taxpayers money.

[Renaud]

Sorry to get back to petards -

A petard was a kind of mine or bomb. Whe laying seige to a castle the attackers would mine tunnels under the walls and set petards to explode (after they had got out) thereby bringing the wall down. Other kinds of petards would simply be stuck on the walls or gates of the fortress.

Hamlet says: "For tis the sport to have the enginer hoist with his owne petar".

Aparently an ancient French word for fart is péter. And an alternative meaning for the expression could be: "blown up by your own fart".

 

[Will]

[quote user="Renaud"]Aparently an ancient French word for fart is péter. And an alternative meaning for the expression could be: "blown up by your own fart".

[/quote]

It is indeed (and not ancient either, its still current, at least in local patois). Which is why the English forename equivalent to Pierre causes so much hilarity to the rural Norman French.

As to payback periods for renewable energy, this is another of those instances where several sets of figures can be used to prove whichever point you want to make. In reality nobody can tell - to get an accurate amortisation you need to know what energy prices - both the prices at which it is sold on to the user, and the price of oil, gas, coal and other raw mateials used for generating power, will do in the next 5-50 years. What is certain is that they will not go down, so my guess is somewhere between the two payback periods quoted (though I rather think nearer to 50 than to 5).

[andyh4]

Please don't take the 5 as a serious figure.  I just used it figuratively (so to speak) to suggest that the number is much less than 50.

[Deimos]

When people are talking about "pay-back" I assume they are talking about financial "pay-backs". However, my own opinion is that the issue is not only financial but the need to avoid the release of greenhouse gasses. Most countries accept the problems caused by global warming and most are making efforts to reduce greenhouse gas release. To do this might require switching to alternative power generation methods that might cost a bit more per Kw and might have longer "pay-backs" than e.g. burning coal. Seems to me that the issue is more about comparative costs for non-greenhouse gas emitting power generation methods plus other considerations (e.g. energy source availability and costs, generation reliability as part of the overall energy generation system, etc.)

Ian

[Will]

Under the carbon trading schemes then greenhouse gases (or rather lack of them) effectively have a financial value too.

[Jonzjob]

I will still say that the best method is to use less, not produce more. It is achievable. It's also a lot less intrusive because you don't need to stick huge waggily sticks up in the most visible places, you don't need to have more and more poewr lines running all over the country. All in all it makes much more sense.

One of the 'gas guzzlers' of the electricity world have got to be the reversable air conditioners that are becoming 'the thing to have' if you look at how many there are in the brico sheds here. They are rated at somewhere in the region of 3.5 Kw and the ones that I have seen in friends houses only heat or cool ONE room. It was proved years ago that warm air heating is inefficient by the fact that the moving air has it's own built in wind chill factor, great for the cooling cycle, but you have to use more heat to get the same result as the radiated variety.

Until we can cut down on the amount of power we use then the only answer must be nuclear power (duck now John!!!)

[powerdesal]

John,

I'm with you on this one, insulation is, in my view, the prime method of reducing power use. I guess I can get a bit OTT on the sbject. I was recently invited to speak on a BBC programme regarding this but after a few minutes (it was a phone in thing) I was abruptly interrupted and subsequently ignored because I was not 'toeing the party line' on green-ness.

Its in everyones interest to reduce their own power use and the primary way (IMHO) is to use your power more efficiently. Whilst it may not do much for my future career prospects I accept that we all have a responsibility for the future prospects of our children and grand children etc and hence a reduction of the need for further power plants is the way to go.

In terms of atmospheric pollution, modern thermal stations are very good but nuclear is better and nuclear fusion rather than fission is the way that research should be heading. I dont feel the need to duck at all on this issue. I am a power profesional and really believe that I know what I am talking about in the real world, not the world that we would wish to see through rose tinted glasses.

[Jonzjob]

I have just found these sites that may interest. The report is a bit long,  but worth the read if you think that windmills are the way forward to saving green house gasses. The second is a situation group in Scotland who are having to put up with the things.

http://www.countryguardian.net/halkema-windenergyfactfiction.pdf

http://www.caithnesswindfarms.co.uk/index.htm

Something that I hadn't realised is that when they run in icing conditions they throw lumps of ice quite a long way. On an aircraft they have anti icing systems that gets rid of ice on the props before it can become a problem, I know because I was an aircraft elecrtrician. But these things don't.  If they throw ice off of one blade it must throw the ballance out loads. On the big boys, 5 megawatt, the bladesare 61.5 meters long and at 17 rpm the tip speed is 403 Kph! One of the blades sheds a couple of pounds of ice and I for one would not like to be living under or near it! In the States last year a 300 foot turbine fell over in light winds. It was a new turbine!

They also catch fire and the firemen have to watch them burn, because they can't reach the fire. That also throws debris about too. Read the report, it tells much more than I could...

I have only got to page 23 of the 53 page report, but????????

I haven't even said anything about the reliability of output, or the lack of it!

[Jonzjob]

I don't speak or read German, but with the photos like these, who needs to. Just scroll down. Germany now has 7000 turbines spread right across from North to South. They are suffering because of them it seems? Read for yourself in the report in my last post...

Edit. Call it a senior moment, but I for to include the web site?

http://members.aol.com/fswemedien/ZZUnfalldatei.htm

[Pip]

 

A proposal to build two 70 metre high wind turbines (one and a half times the height of Exeter Cathedral) on the edge of Dartmoor has just been dismissed.  Thank goodness !  They would have been a blot on a beautiful landscape.  To quote the govenment planning inspector 'The turbines would form a restless intrusion into this quiet and reposeful upland, to it's detriment'

[andyh4]

[quote user="Jonzjob"]

I don't speak or read German, but with the photos like these, who needs to.

http://members.aol.com/fswemedien/ZZUnfalldatei.htm

[/quote]

 

Maybe you do J.  From his/her disclaimer at the bottom of the page first sentence item 1.

Der Autor übernimmt keinerlei Gewähr für die Aktualität, Korrektheit, Vollständigkeit oder Qualität der bereitgestellten Informationen.

 

The author accepts absolutely no repsonsibility for the topicality, correctness, completeness or quality of the presented information.

Hmmm.  wonder why that is.

Clearly a (wo)man with a hatred of wind turbines who has used every event they can find to try to discredit them, including bad driving by a truck delivering a mast, a failure of a lightning conductor system, an accident during the erection of a mast.  They even suggest that the effect of sunlight "flashing" through the turbines has caused 74 accidents on a stretch of road. and the examples are from not only Germany but the US and Netherlands even though it claims to be a German list of incidents. 

 

Blitzanschlag features a lot - lightning strike.  Now is it really a surprise that a mast stuck 50+ metres in the air is liable to lightning strike?  If this were a proper conecern every church steeple would need to be demolished

 

You'll also see "nicht bekannt" used a lot as well = not known.  This is with reference to the type of machine, age of machine, amount of damage, whether covered by insurance etc..

Hmmm. I wonder why that is.

Also key links (for example to the TÜV report = DRIRE in France) do not work

Hmmm.  I wonder why that is.

 

I am not saying that there have never been any problems with turbines, clearly they are as susceptible to mechanical problems as any other piece of machinery, but this sort of site does not allow an objective view of the worth and dangers of turbines. 

Taken at face value some of these incidents seem more than a little worrying - especailly since they seem to get no media coverage here in Germany and I live in the provice with 5 of the incidents reported.

Hmmm.  I wonder why that is.

By the way I don't have an up to date number, but I think 7000 is way too low an estimate for turbines in Germany.  I saw 15000 quoted some time ago and I would guess the number would by now be getting on for double that if not more.  Now if they were genuinely so dangerous, do you think the authorities would allow such rampant expansion to go on?

[Will]

Yes. That is a very low estimate. The German wind turbine population was 11,000 in 2001, and is now around 16,000, with potential to produce 20,000MW. Most of the turbines are in the north of Germany, particularly Schleswig-Holstein, near the Danish border, while most of the demand is further south.

This highlights a problem which contributed to the recent power failures throughout Europe. A sudden cold spell in Germany created a sharp rise in demand. The wind that was bringing the cold weather from the north set the turbines spinning. One of the country's main transmission lines was out of service, which caused an overload. Cologne tripped out, and in a domino effect it was followed by the rest of Germany, most of France, and a lot of the rest of  Europe (even extending to North Africa).

Wind power certainly has its place, but only as part of a joined-up, properly planned, system. Too many people see it as a complete answer to carbon emissions and global warming, which it is not. I totally agree with previous posts about the first priority should be to reduce demand by lowering waste and unnecessary use of electricity.

[Will]

Getting back to the nature aspects, some further research has shown that in general the effect of wind farms on the wildlife population is pretty insignificant, at least compared with other human-related activities such as hunting, roadkill etc.

There have been a couple of specific areas of concern though.

The RSPB in Britain has highlighted the fact that certain birds of prey seem particularly vulnerable. It points to a colony of rare sea eagles in Norway having been virtually wiped out by an offshore wind farm. Similar concerns caused the cancellation of a wind farm project in Australia.

Also, there is increasing awareness of the possible effect of wind turbines on the bat population. Studies in North America indicate that migratory species of bats are at particular risk from the turbine blades. 

[powerdesal]

JJ,

I have just read the full report at your link, I recommend everyone read it and learn. Only then can a reasoned, adult debate take place about how to meet the energy needs of the future.

The report restates what I have said before on this subject - Wind Power is a Confidence trick being perpetrated on a concerned society.

[Jonzjob]

Steve, if you thought that that one was interesting, have a look at  this.

http://www.ref.org.uk/images/pdfs/eon.2005.REF.pdf

It sites Germany's case an how the U.K. seem to be looking at it! The one bloke that I met in the U.K. who sells and fits huge wind turbines is a person that I would not buy a new car from never mind a used one. A real arogant sob. I didn't need him to know that these turbines are a wonderful idea,,,,,,   IF you are selling them!

 

[chris pp]

The wildlife concerns are more to do with where they are sited, Will, and in some cases insufficient research has been or is taking place. The majority of European bats migrate, but the truth is that they are far more at risk from other forms of human activity than they are from wind turbines, all the time people post on these fora asking how to get rid of them from their buildings, vast numbers of people renovate without taking them into consideration and new builds invariably have no place for them. Trucks kill large numbers and simply removing a hedgerow or other hunting corridor frequently forces them into traffic.

Pesticides and other chemicals also play a large role in threatening bats and reducing their populations.

My only point here is that using wildlife or bio diversity as an argument against wind turbines just does not stack up when held against everything else.

[IMG]http://i133.photobucket.com/albums/q73/unautremonde/Oddments/_40876026_powerstationap203.jpg[/IMG]

Chris

[powerdesal]

[quote user="Jonzjob"]

Steve, if you thought that that one was interesting, have a look at  this.

http://www.ref.org.uk/images/pdfs/eon.2005.REF.pdf

It sites Germany's case an how the U.K. seem to be looking at it! The one bloke that I met in the U.K. who sells and fits huge wind turbines is a person that I would not buy a new car from never mind a used one. A real arogant sob. I didn't need him to know that these turbines are a wonderful idea,,,,,,   IF you are selling them!

 

[/quote]

JJ,

Another nail (hopefully) in the coffin of the wind power con job. The problem is of course the extremely closed minds of those who see power generation and distribution in over-simplistic terms and refuse to believe that they are wrong. They still want their lights, electric kettles and CH pumps but cant ( or wont ) see the big picture.

Having done my 'time' in grid control and in the daily operational generation planning and control of a 1000MW + power station I feel very sad that people ( some people) are unwilling to look at reality and prefer the rose tinted glasses view of the world.