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 ...
Sprinkler systems need to be mandated for Wind turbines.
Part of the reason for that is Liberal eastern politicians demanding that we send fossil fuel products east at artificially low rates so East Coast ecof**ks don’t freeze their dainty asses off in the winter
Nah...I think the smoke was allegedly black.
Maybe the smoke WAS ACTUALLY black and didn't just appear that way.
“Running Standby backup power required by law.”
So you get to build TWO power plants where only ONE used to do.
The economics are worse than that. You don’t have to post a bond to build these infernal machines. So in 20 years when they are all worn out and the companies are all bankrupt and out of business, they will just stand there producing nothing and blighting the landscape forever. Unless the government comes in and spends a billion dollars to tear them all down and dig up tens of millions of tons of concrete in the ground.
You can’t get away with that with any surface mine. You have to post a huge surety bond before you open the mine. That money is used to reclaim the land when you are done mining. Only wind and solar get away with this crap.
The whole gas grid debacle was and is political. The Texas RRC can and should mandate the winterization of the grid at least the critical gas clean up and separator plants, the pumps on the critical pipelines should be on uninterruptible dedicated powerlines or better yet tell the EPA to stuff it and go back to natural gas powered pumps so the gas in the line is powering the pump moving it down the line. The EPA mandated clear air act emissions limits so the cost to keep the gas powered pumps which are ship sized diesel engine sized was too high they were switched out to 15,000 kv train engine sized electric motors that now need the grid up to pump gas. Texas also needs to have more than 17 black start capable plants all of them are natural gas powered if the grid is down again Texas is screwed.
Texas used to keep hydro power plants as mandated black start capability since water is nearly always available behind the dams to start the grid with in an emergency. Any large generator can be a black start as long as it has a permanent magnet DC generator on site and fine speed control of the initial generator to get too and keep at synchronous speed to output that critical initial 60Hz AC sync waveform. Every other generators field coil will be synchronized to that initial one. Gas turbine don’t make for good black start their speed control is not near fine enough, large piston gas engines have the needed controls and are the first choice in black start. Hydro turbines also have the fine speed control they are a second option. Giant nuclear turbines are the least controllable they need to be synced by the megawatt level.field coil signal a terrible choice for black start and none in Texas have the ability to run without a preexisting grid signal in the tens of megawatt range at least.
Solar has inherent black start since inverters need no feed coil energy. Inverters can output a 60Hz AC sync waveform from a quartz oscillator but most utility grade inverters sync to the grid signal or if the grid is down a national time signal such as GPS. In stand alone mode my inverters use GPS atomic clock signals to put out a down to the part per million 60Hz signal. Once the grid come back up they sense the grid sync and shift the wave form to match it then trip the autobreaker to reconnect to the grid once in sync.
What kind of oil one wonders...
Big Oil is making money off of windfarms.
Paging enviroweenies.
Calling wind turbines “green” is a huge hoax and prank being pulled on the enviro-weenies. The manufacture and construction of the towers, transformers and gearboxes that convert the wind flow into alternating electricity may be engineering marvels, but they are ultimately monuments to unreliability, and are a huge boondoggle in terms of the number of kWHs of electrical energy actually distributed on the electric grid. For every kWH these windmill towers are calculated to produce, an equivalent number of hydrocarbon-fueled generators have to be standing by for those times when the wind fails, or equipment failures take the wind turbine offline. Just dispense with the windmill towers and solar panels altogether, and go back to the hydrocarbon-fueled power generation systems, cutting out the expense of even erecting the towers or building the solar farms to begin with.
Now, you want cheap, reliable, baseline power, that runs 24/7/365 year after year, go to some form of nuclear. The uranium-fueled light water reactors are technology that was new in maybe 1960, but there are better alternatives now tested and proven on a smaller scale, that can replace the uranium-fueled light water reactors, and do it even cheaper, faster, and with NO chance of core meltdown, or storage of the “spent” fuel rods for maybe 10,000 years until radioactivity dies down to tolerable levels.
The thorium-fueled molten salt reactors were developed as an alternative, and have been shown to be feasible. The fuel, thorium, is much more available than uranium, and the spent fuel residue is of much smaller volume and toxicity than the “spent” uranium fuel rods, which still contain some 97% of their potential energy. In fact, to initiate the chain reaction in a thorium atomic pile, the molten salt has to be “seeded” with a small amount of this “spent” fuel rod material, eventually using up all the “spent” uranium fuel rods, ending the need to keep it in storage for extended periods of time.
That is better.
Looks like the lightning caught the tip of a blade on fire and thing went downhill from there.
Humans will never run out of uranium.
Oh it gets better
https://spectrum.ieee.org/uranium-from-seawater
The cost to fuel a PWR is a very small part of the total cost of the energy sold depending on the country under 2% of total LCOE. we could double the cost of uranium and it wouldn’t add 5% to the total cost. Doubling the cost allows for two paths one is the reprocessing route that the French , Russians,Koreans and Chinese all chose. The other is to use seawater based uranium and just deep bore hole the whole waste stream in mile plus deep dry Granite. The Koreans already have costs of reprocessing down to within a few fractions of a cents per kWh. The benefit for reprocessing is the waste stream is only the 4% of spent fuel that actually is wastes the other 96% is still valuable fuel it should be a crime to throw that away but Jimmy the fool Carter cost the USA our leadership position in reprocessing we invested the dang process after all.
https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/29/046/29046757.pdf
Thanks for all that info. Nicely done.
Question is: why do they go bad or whatever?
Uh, climactic deterioration? You know. Nature.
The fire chief estimated there were 800 gallons of oil in the gearbox...
—
What the heck is the size of the gearbox?! The average car’s oil is a few quarts. 800 gallons is the equivalent of over a dozen 55 gallon drums.
VIDEO: Wind turbine struck by lighting in Cromwell, Texas
https://rumble.com/v1d9ibd-wind-turbine-struck-by-lighting-in-cromwell-texas..html
Don’t forget about the house sized concrete and steel thing underground holding it up
Since most wont download the PDF I will pull out the important part this is Koreans in the 1990s the economics are better now.
“All costs are expressed in constant dollars in the year of 1996.
Table-2 shows the results of economic comparison of MFC with UFC. As shown in
this table, levelized fuel cycle cost of MFC and UFC is 6.78 and 6.34 mills/kwh, respectively. Economic inferiority of MFC is mainly stemming from high reprocessing cost.
Sensitivity analyses were carried out to see the effects of the change in some critical input parameters such as uranium price, reprocessing, and MOX fabrication costs on the levelized fuel cycle costs. According to the sensitivity analysis, if the uranium price rises over $335/kgU(=$129/lb U3O8), MFC is economically more competitive than UFC. On the other hand, if MOX fabrication costs and reprocessing costs each fall by 20%”
The costs are 6.78 mills vs 6.34 mills per kWh. A mill is 1/1000 of a U.S. Dollar so tenths of cents.
What this shows is that the once through fuel cycle fuel cost for the uranium plus enrichment plus fabrication are 6.34 tenths of a U.S. Cent per kWh vs 6.78 tenths of a cent. This is how cheap nuclear fuel is, by far the cheapest form of thermal energy on the planet. Mind you th at nuclear power is at best 33% efficient. There is 3412 BTU to kWh, at 33% efficient it takes a heat rate of 10,339.39 BTU/kWh that cost 6.34 tenths of a U.S. Cent in fuel costs. 1 barrel (42 gallons) of crude oil produced in the United States = 5,691,000 Btu....at a cost of 6.34ths of a U.S. Cent for 10,400 btu worth of heat. 5.6E6/10339.39*0.00643=3.489 That’s equal to $3.489 per barrel of oil. Read that again, nuclear power is the cheapest form of thermal energy on the planet.
In dollar terms it is $0.00634 vs $0.00678 or a 44 hundredths of a cent per kWh difference. To reprocess spent fuel vs dumping it. This is how much that turd Carter screwed us. We could eliminate the waste issue forever for a few HUNDREDTHS of a cent increase in fuel costs F that guy from now to all eternity.
The biggest problem is that after an event like this, the turbines become derelict…
If you have a spinning top, and apply friction, the top slows.
Since we have put up these huge windmills, that might cause friction that could slow the Earths rotation.
I have invented a new crisis: GLOBAL SLOWING!
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