Big Wind
and Big Sun
when winter comes
can’t get it done....
50 mph winds! My goodness! What a storm!
That’s a shame.
Irony defined.
Is it ok to laugh
Isn’t that what Brandon was touting a little bit ago?
Unless there is some sort of lens artifact, the windmill in the center of the picture background has a definite lean to the left....
Reminds me of one of my all-time favorite Rush-isms, which he'd say if a caller called in the 3rd hour of his show and talked about something mentioned in the 1st hour. Rush, knowing that some of his listeners come and go during the day, like on their lunch break, would always catch-up listeners who didn't know the context from the first hour by saying something like:
"For those of you just now joining the program in the 3rd hour because you don't work because you're on welfare, what the caller is talking about..."
ROTFLMChristianFreeAmericanSuccessfulHairyWhiteUnsodomizedAO!
Well at least it wasn’t another Aberfan.
So parking a truck next to a machine is proof of good maintenance? I bet I can sell a bridge or two there.
Uh...NO dummy, it WAS the "wind speed" that brought it down!
Now, the reason it was susceptible to those wind speeds may have been defective materials, components, or design.
Looks like a total fail of the base support. Clean break right at where it would have been welded or otherwise connected together. Bad welds? If so, it likely wasn’t the only one involved - yet.
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.
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Ok… so whenever one reads an article like this, it is ‘mandatory’ that the word ‘rare’ or ‘rarity’ show up in the first few sentences. Then it’s mandatory to make a claim of how many homes it generated power for… even though of course it generates nothing when the wind isn’t blowing. Having said that, there is not much to wonder about as far as the cause…. I can show pictures of dozens of IWTs that have failed the same way. Here are the symptoms…
- Came down in strong winds… but at a wind speed that was only a fraction of what the design wind speed is.
- There is almost no visible damage to the IWT except what happened when it hit the ground. ….case in point is that it looks like the blades were intact when it hit the ground and they crumpled on impact.
- The main tower section actually looks to have escaped relatively unscathed…. just some deformation because of the way it rolled itself over the knoll along side the road.
- It came down at about the 8 to 12 year range…. other lifespans are possible but this seems to be the most common.
- Finally… and this is the key to understanding the failure, there is a flange that has simply separated, and you can’t find a flange bolt anywhere. Neither can you find any distortion to either the top or bottom flanges.....the exception perhaps being where it hit the ground but this isn’t actually all that visible. Logically, wouldn’t one expect that as the tower toppled over, some of the bolts would hang on until it distorted the flange and perhaps ripped it apart? Why didn’t it do that? It’s as if the bolts all magically disappeared. What a lot of people don’t realize is that the flange should be as strong as the tower sections that are in between the flanges. So how does one explain that the bolts all magically disappeared?
The answer is simple… the bolts failed in fatigue. Over the years, the tower sways back in forth due to the winds. There are specific bolt installation protocols and then retightening checks… sometimes that doesn’t get done exactly right but regardless, eventually due to the cyclical loading in response to the winds, bolts develop fatigue cracks and are weakened… and then a decent wind comes along and they essentially all pop at once. The bolts failed in fatigue....what is not known is what all the mitigating factors were.
Well, blow me down! -Popeye
Bearing seizure?
50 MPH winds don’t seem too unusual on occasion for much of the World. It should be able to stay up during that, IMO.
Maybe this is what “renewable” means.