Posted on 07/23/2022 2:10:19 PM PDT by DFG
CROWELL, Texas - A North Texas wind farm is one turbine down thanks to what officials believe was a devastating lightning strike to one of the massive structures on Friday afternoon.
Videos from witnesses and firefighters showed the wind turbine generator ablaze and disintegrate in the sky over Crowell, Texas.
Doppler radar indicated there was plenty of lightning strikes around the Foard City wind facility before firefighters received the call about the high-altitude fire.
Crews with the Crowell Volunteer Fire Department responded, but Fire Chief Perry Shaw said there was little his firefighters could do to put the fire out.
"We’re not equipped to handle that kind of fire. Nobody in the area really is to speak of," Shaw said.
The fire chief estimated there were 800 gallons of oil in the gearbox and around 1,300 gallons of mineral oil in the ground-level transformer, which caused the smoke to appear dark black in the sky.
(Excerpt) Read more at fox10phoenix.com ...
So.
Wind farms use fossil fuels....oil.
Checkmate, Biden.
so every turbine has Oil lots of it ? How will they run without oil , render people down after extermination ?
The weather inside a steam turbine housing is always much worse than the weather outside.
LOL at the moronic Texans who made their 4energy grid reliant on ancient wind mill technology.
“Dont mess with Texas” LOL at the losers with low self esteem.
Anyone got a loop of that?
Lucky the smoke was enviro friendly. I didn’t much use to hope for hail storms of lightning but................ Cat 5 once the ruin 30 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico..........
Lightning protection must’ve failed.
Plus you can’t recycle them; there are places where there are scores of those blades just laying there. And also, an engineer told me that it takes power to run those windmills, something like 3kw to energize the magnetic field to produce electricity - just like those old car generators.
20 year expected operating life...
21 Year payback period...
(Not including disposal, which is so expensive as to be cost prohibitive)
No commercially available power storage method.
Running Standby backup power required by law.
I saw a bird fly by at around 00:28 laughing at the wind mill.
The best lubricating oils on earth are PAO oils. Mobil One was a fully PAO oil until the 2000s when Castrol won their lawsuit and Exxon switched to vizbreaker and hydrogenated oils since synthetic oil is a marketing term in the USA now and not a legal chemical description like the EU.
Ok so what’s the point. PAO oils have the largest range of viscosity index of any oils, the largest range of temperature stability, and the lowest sludge factors. Exxon used to make their PAO base stocks with...wait for it....ETHANOL which is one molecule away from ethylene which is one alpha bonded C=C bond from an alpha olefin which when polymerized forms poly-alpha olefins the best oils on the planet. Sophomore chemistry lesson over for the day. Exxon produced PAO by the hundreds of thousands of gallons from industrial ethanol they could just as easily do it again.
Do not forget the Propane/Nat Gas used to keep them warm in winter.
Local CL keeps having ads from guys tying to sell scrap blades for hundreds of dollars. As “Art” and advertising project components.
Better version
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qh-SyKq8kBQ
“something like 3kw to energize the magnetic field to produce electricity - just like those old car generators.”
This is inherent to all synchronous generators. To energize the field coils of a nuclear power plants main steam turbine generators is measured in the megawatts it’s usually 100 to 1 for every one hundred megawatts of output you need one megawatt worth of field currents. This energy is first provided by an external source once the turbine is running it is backfed from the output of the turbine itself usually as a separate DC generator on the same shaft to avoid a harmonic feedback issue. Wind turbines do the same thing they are energized by external means until they are spun up then like any other synchronous generator become self energizing.
This is why black start capability is only found in a few thermal plants just because the main turbines are spinning via nuclear power or gas turbines without the grid to synchronize too and draw their field coil energization from those turbines are useless.
For black start a separate on site Dynamo must be present usually a permanent magnet DC generator driven by a fairly large diesel or gas turbine. That is spun up first since it’s permanent magnet DC generator it immediately puts out HVDC current that is feed to the field coils of a single main turbine beginning it’s AC generating cycle then it is spun up to synchronous speed to output 60Hz AC. This becomes the seed generator the others on site are then feed HVAC current from that generator into their field coils bringing them into synchronous not only with the field current but also to each other. At that point This plant exports power to special dedicated lines to a near by plant it top spins up and uses those dedicated lines to energize its field coils in sync with the other generators already running. This process continues until the whole grid is back up it can take weeks.
Texas came within 3 minutes of having to do a black start when the natural gas grid lost 65% of its capacity during the freeze. We in the industry warned them in 2008,2011,2012 to winterize the well heads and surface lines plus gas processing plants we were ignored.
Texas is proving that Wind Turbines are A FAIL
Thanks for the input. ✌. Weird how the high dollar folks dismiss folks that actually know.
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