28 May 2021

What Happens When Wind Turbines are Old?

When wind turbines are no longer useful: They get explosive demolition

No effort was made to preserve foundations or other wind farm infrastructure. CDI’s crew felled the 90 Units in two (2) mobilizations to the site, permitting the Wind Farm Owner to complete salvage of blades and drive-train elements from some of the wind turbines to provide replacement parts for similar Units they operate at other wind farm locations.

I can't find any info on when this wind-farm was constructed, but Democrtic Underground says that the first of the Mitsubishi 1000A Wind Turbines were installed in 2002, giving a maximum life of 18 years.

This is the video from Controlled Demolition, Inc. Felling of 90 Mitsubishi 1000A Wind Turbines.

And this video from Discovery UK still makes me smile. The Glaring Engineering Mistake That Made Wind Turbines Inefficient | Massive Engineering Mistakes

Believe it or not, when engineers first installed wind turbines, they thought they'd be pretty much maintenance free, but they were wrong.

7 comments:

  1. The UK video about the engineers not considering impacts from hail stones or dust and the damages to the blades is an interesting but not surprising story.

    When you do something that no one has ever done before, you find things no one has ever found before.

    The problem with all of this is that the turbines are nowhere near as reliable nor as good a power source as people claim. Then add that the fiberglass reinforced plastic (epoxy) blades aren't recyclable, and they don't seem like a ecologically sound way to get power.

    I don't know of an installation that's big enough/dense enough with turbines that interference with weather is clearly demonstrated, but they are taking energy out of the winds which means the winds will be weaker. It would seem they're affecting the weather by definition.

    I have seen them on weather radars, though. Both the aircraft weather radars I used to work on and the NOAA ground-based weather radars.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, big windfarms change the micro climates downstream.

      Delete
    2. Operating in the North Sea is not new, even if the wind turbines were.

      There is a push to stop building wind turbines in the Great Lakes because even today the engineers don't put oil sumps under the gear boxes. So ever once in a while a turbine's gear box will develop a leak and dump a relatively large amount of oil into the Great Lakes, which ecologists have been battling to save since the 1960s at least.

      Because "maintenance free" means that no gearbox/transmission will EVER develop a leak. So why worry about a way to catch that oil?

      Delete
  2. I didn't see any salvageable blades come out of that.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. They would have been removed before the demolition guys got to work

      Delete

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