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Why Are Some Wind Turbines Not Turning? SNIP 2. The Wind Is Too Strong Wind turbines need wind to function, yet too much wind is ineffective. Wind turbines can only be safely operated up to a particular wind speed, known as the “cut-off wind speed” or “cut-out wind speed.” Any wind exceeding the limit is too powerful for the mechanism to manage, posing threats to the equipment and the workers.

Woof, the news just keeps getting grimmer and grimmer for Danish offshore energy behemoth Ørsted...and it's great.Thanks to a heads-up this morning from HotAir regular John Clark, I have had an encouraging time digging into what's looking damn near like a collapse of one of the biggest names in the wind farm business. It bodes some serious ill for the entire sector.You all know from reading my posts that Ørsted has had a miserable twelve months, thanks to a number of circumstances. Most of them stem from contracts agreed to based on overconfidence in continued government largesse, cheap financing, low...

Due to the Biden administration's decision to waive financial assurance fees, should Vineyard Wind fail and not fully fund their decommissioning account in a timely manner, the public will likely have to pick up the tab.. Biden administration reportedly waived fees for an offshore wind project that are in place to ensure that the infrastructure is removed and the site reclaimed at the end of the project’s life.. Joe Biden, as part of his climate agenda, is pushing an aggressive buildout of offshore wind projects along the East Coast. With the offshore wind industry struggling financially, the waiving of these...

It’s about time Californians of all ideological persuasions wake up and stop what is possibly the most economically wasteful and environmentally destructive project in American history: the utility scale adoption of offshore wind energy. The California Legislature intends to despoil our coastline and coastal waters with floating wind turbines, 20+ miles offshore, tethered to the sea floor 4,000 feet beneath the waves. Along with tethering cables, high voltage wires will descend from each of these noisy, 1,000 foot tall leviathans, but we’re to assume none of this will disrupt the migrations of our treasured Cetaceans and other marine and avian...

Officials in Sweetwater say an out-of-state company has made their town a dump for the seldom-seen trash created by renewable energy.

Earlier this week Texas grid operator ERCOT (Electric Reliability Council of Texas) asked residents to reduce energy usage amid a sweltering heat wave to avoid rolling blackouts. ERCOT manages electric power to more than 26 million Texas customers and represents 90% of the state’s electric load, according to the company. Temperatures soared to 115+ degrees with the heat index in parts of Texas on Thursday amid an excessive heat warning. ERCOT issued the voluntary conservation notice due to extreme temperatures, forecasted high demand and lower reserves due to low wind generation. ... The wind turbines aren’t producing enough energy. Texas...

It could be argued that the basic arithmetic showing wind power is an economic and societal disaster in the making should be clear to a bright primary school child. Now the Oxford University mathematician and physicist, researcher at CERN and Fellow of Keble College, Emeritus Professor Wade Allison has done the sums. The U.K. is facing the likelihood of a failure in the electricity supply, he concludes.“Wind power fails on every count,” he says, adding that governments are ignoring “overwhelming evidence” of the inadequacies of wind power, “and resorting to bluster rather than reasoned analysis”.Professor Allison’s dire warnings are contained...

Bloomberg Business Week, no foe of green energy, headlines: Wind Turbines Taller Than the Statue of Liberty Are Falling Over.” The article beneath the headline reports on a variety of alarming disasters involving wind turbines, including collapses of very tall sructures.On a calm, sunny day last June, Mike Willey was feeding his cattle when he got a call from the local sheriff’s dispatcher. A motorist had reported that one of the huge turbines at a nearby wind farm had collapsed in dramatic fashion. Willey, chief of the volunteer fire department in Ames, 90 miles northwest of Oklahoma City, set out...

It turns out that efforts to recycle plastic are a waste of time and energy. The environmental advocacy group Greenpeace issued a report showing that "mechanical and chemical recycling of plastic waste has largely failed and will always fail because plastic waste is: (1) extremely difficult to collect, (2) virtually impossible to sort for recycling, (3) environmentally harmful to reprocess, (4) often made of and contaminated by toxic materials, and (5) not economical to recycle." Lisa Ramsden, a senior plastics campaigner at Greenpeace USA and one of the authors of the report, said "most plastic is not being recycled in...

As the imposition of a tax on the use of fossil fuels is debated in Pennsylvania and Virginia, along comes an analysis showing the failure of such efforts to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide in the name of saving the planet. Under a multi-state compact known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), Virginia already taxes producers of electricity on the basis of how much carbon dioxide they emit in burning fossil fuels — mainly coal and natural gas. Efforts to have the state withdraw from RGGI appear to have stalled. Pennsylvania officially entered RGGI July 1 and would begin...

Last week the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that they had sentenced ESI Energy for a “blatant disregard” of federal wildlife laws of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA). In their guilty plea to multiple violations, ESI admitted to the killing of at least 150 bald and golden eagles across 50 of its wind-energy facilities since 2012. Nearly all died of blunt force trauma attributable to being struck by a wind-turbine blade. The so-called “clean” energy company — a subsidiary of NextEra Energy — was fined $8 million, or about $53,300 per carcass. It turns out that the fine...

Some turbines killed multiple eagles and because the carcasses are not always found, officials said the number killed was likely higher than the 150 birds cited in court documents. Wind energy company pleads guilty after at least 150 eagles killed in U.S. Some turbines killed multiple eagles and because the carcasses are not always found, officials said the number killed was likely higher than the 150 birds cited in court documents. NextEra Energy was sentenced to probation and ordered to pay more than $8 million in fines and restitution after at least 150 eagles were killed over the past decade....

A U.S. wind power developer pleaded guilty to multiple violations of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act after its wind turbine blades allegedly killed more than 135 bald and golden eagles across the country. The company, ESI Energy, pleaded guilty Tuesday to three counts of violations in the form of golden eagle deaths. Prosecutors said the birds were documented to have been killed by blunt force trauma after being struck by its wind turbine blades at its facilities in Wyoming or New Mexico, where ESI had not applied for the necessary permits. As part of the settlement, ESI “acknowledged that at...

Among Governor Glenn Youngkin’s first actions was Executive Order #9 initiating Virginia’s withdrawal from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, the Northeastern U.S. “carbon market” that sets and enforces emission limits for coal and gas power plants. RGGI also lets utilities buy “carbon credits” when emissions exceed those limits, passing costs on to families, businesses, hospitals and schools. Special interests will contest withdrawal, but the EO sets the proper tone for reforming Virginia’s energy system. Meanwhile, though, the 2020 “Virginia Clean Economy Act” still requires that utility companies close all fossil fuel generating plants – and replace them with wind and...

The government and big financial institutions promote a fraudulent analysis of the cost of solar and wind electricity. Their narrative is that wind and solar are competitive with traditional fossil fuels and that the cost of wind and solar is rapidly dropping. Academics and the media amplify and spread the fraudulent analysis. The basis of the fraud is a simple comparison of the cost per kilowatt hour at the plant fence for electricity produced by wind or solar versus electricity produced by a traditional plant. Some or all of the massive subsidies for wind and solar are ignored in such...

There was a new round of unpleasant news for consumers in the United Kingdom this month and for once it didn’t have anything to do with COVID. Residents receiving their energy bills were shocked to see a steep increase in the price of electricity. We’re not talking a small percentage, either. Costs were double what they had been in previous months and more than four times higher than during the same period in 2020. But how could that be? The country has been investing heavily in renewable energy to meet its obligations under the climate deal and many new wind-power...

The now-familiar sight of traditional propeller wind turbines could be replaced in the future with wind farms containing more compact and efficient vertical turbines. [Photo in Comment #1]

Wind and solar energy are both essentially obsolete technologies. There is a reason why only the very rich or the very adventurous sail across oceans: the wind is unreliable, and at best produces relatively little energy. Nevertheless, liberals have concocted fantasies whereby all of our electricity, or perhaps our entire economy, will be powered by those fickle sources. There are a number of reasons why this will never happen, but a paper published last week by Center of the American Experiment argues that land use constraints are the most basic reason why wind and solar are inexorably destined to fail....

Correcting the record is important since assigning the wrong reasons for Texas’s electric blackouts will lead to the wrong solutions.hen the lights went out in Texas earlier this year, corporate media and the left swiftly developed a narrative and stuck to it: Texas failed because it didn’t regulate enough and it wasn’t part of the national grid.This storyline also claimed a lack of electricity from wind and solar had nothing to do with the disaster that claimed almost 60 lives. Instead, the blackouts were the failure of normally reliable thermal power—natural gas, coal, and nuclear—due to a reluctance to spend...

For nearly two decades, commercial wind farms have been touted in Maine as a way to generate electricity without pollution, and as a way rural locales in Maine can generate revenue for themselves by hosting turbines worth hundreds of millions of dollars. But several counties and towns are finding out they are getting less revenue out of the wind projects than they had expected when they were wooed in the 2000s and 2010s by developers looking to erect turbines several hundred feet tall along local remote, elevated ridgelines. In some cases, the developers are arguing that recent advancements in wind...