Posted on 02/15/2022 5:12:10 PM PST by nascarnation
Villagers were woken by a 300ft wind turbine crashing down on a Welsh mountainside - after it was blown over during storms which brought 50pmh winds.
The £20million turbine - double the height of Nelson's Column - snapped apart and blades crumpled in raging wind.
Families in the nearby village of Gilfach Goch, near Bridgend, South Wales, told how it sounded like 'thunder and lightning'.
It woke them at around 6.50am on Monday morning and echoed around the valley below.
The 29-turbine Pant Y Wal wind farm opened in 2013 and makes enough power for 19,000 homes - until one was wrecked in the storm at the weekend.
Villagers are questioning how the turbine could have fallen apart during winds of around 50mph and demand officials check the status of neighbouring turbines.
Nordex - the company that manufactured the turbine - said an investigation is now underway to determine the cause of the collapse.
A renewable energy industry expert, who wanted to remain anonymous, told MailOnline that a collapsing turbine is a 'real rarity', adding there 'are more than 10,000 of them up and down the country'. He suggested the materials might have been faulty, but insisted it was 'very unlikely to be the local wind speed' that brought it down.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
I wonder if it generated forward thrust and pulled itself over.
Too bad the rest of the wind “farm” did not get blown down!
I hate the damn things!
Bravo. Nice poem. Nuclear and oil are the two best, safest, cheapest and most efficient energy sources. Solar, wind, and geothermal are expensive dreams that take 75 years to break even.
Maybe this is what “renewable” means.
Good explanation and failure analysis. The photographs confirm your thoughts.
Someone forgot to tighten the bolts to spec.
Or gophers....
that blows...
29 windmills at £20million each = £58million
19000 homes = £30526 per home
£700 average electricty bill per home (source: British Gas) = 43.6 years before this investment sees a return!
(assuming they don’t fall over first).
Oh, oh, gollies! Must have been a 1000-year storm. No one could have foreseen this!!!
Boneheads.
If your equipment is going to be exposed to weather (e.g., solar panels, turbines, etc) and you don’t design for multiples of possible events — the people who paid you are the real idiots.
No flanges in sight, but the fallen tower (part) appears to have been constructed of 20-foot sections. Perhaps these towers are located near the ocean, and suffered from corrosion.
There is a huge flange pictured at the bottom, in a fun, time-lapse, build:
As for “Villagers were woken”...What happened to “awakened”?
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