The Wind Blows, But There Is No Wind Power

How can this be? Most of Alberta’s wind fleet slowly shut down Thursday night, but not for lack of wind

Science is hard, and politicians suck at being engineers.

One of the first lessons any new engineering student learns in their materials class is “cold brittle behaviour” of materials. When it gets really cold, like -30 C or colder, many materials lose much of their strength and are prone to shattering. This applies to wind turbines as much as it applies to car bumpers.

And as a result, most wind turbines are shut down when the ambient temperatures reaches around -30 C, lest their continued operation cause them to shatter. And such shutdowns were plainly evident the evening of Jan. 11, on both the Alberta Electric System Operator website and on Dispatcho.app. That’s a website that logs the minute-by-minute data published by the AESO regarding the Alberta electrical grid.

While under the same wind conditions, wind power had been supplying a fair amount of power hours before, things were shut down as the temperatures fell. Minus 30 degrees Celsius is minus 22 degrees Fahrenheit. So not an unusual occurrence in north-central North America.

How do they plan to handle this? Alberta is building a natural-gas powered generating plant to take up the load.

Hat tip to Small Dead Animals: Wind blows, but wind generation sucks.

… when it’s cold,