Posted on 01/23/2023 9:13:26 AM PST by SeekAndFind
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 to survey the scene.
The steel tower, which once stood hundreds of feet tall, was buckled in half, and the turbine blades, whose rotation took the machine higher than the Statue of Liberty, were splayed across the wheat field below. The turbine, made by General Electric Co., had been in operation less than a year. “It fell pretty much right on top of itself,” Willey says.
Another GE turbine of the same model collapsed in Colorado a few days later. That wind farm’s owner-operator, NextEra Energy Inc., later attributed it to a blade flaw and said it and GE had taken steps to prevent future mishaps. A spokesperson for GE declined to say what went wrong in both cases in a statement to Bloomberg.
The instances are part of a rash of recent wind turbine malfunctions across the US and Europe, ranging from failures of key components to full collapses.
The article blames the “rash” of incidents on the rush to install turbine capacity, but there are also permanent factors that make engineering, building, and maintaining wind farms difficult and risky.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Wind is a gimmick to keep the global warming Moonbats at bay.
Lol!
That caught me by surprise...
:-)
And here I was worried that in fifteen years, there would be mile after mile of these abandoned towers, standing like lonely and ghostly sentinels, scattered across the landscape.
So they will just fall down by themselves?
At least the salvage teams could then get at them. Lots of recyclable scrap value.
It is hard to tell by the picture.
Did the metal studs at the base fail or did the rotational forces pull the concrete foundation right out of the ground?
These were all GE wind turbines. Most likely the steel was not meant to endure the stress put on the material.
Most likely the installation contractor did not use the proper materials. Less likely that the GE engineer did not design it properly.
You know there was about a 20 year period when the non-working towers in the California coast range just sat there unprepared.
I have also heard that the blades are made of a composite that makes the blade difficult to cut up and problematic for the chunks to be recycled.
RE: Where’s Disaster Girl these days?
She reminds me of a young CARRIE
Wow! Having watched videos about how much concrete and rebar they put into the foundations for those towers, it is just amazing to seen one blown over like that.
Wind and solar are the enviros Frankenstein monster.
Actually, many immigrants - including, I’m sure, some illegals - do excellent work. In our neighborhood we’ve seen Hispanics completely restore and remodel decrepit houses, engineer ingenious solutions to wet basements, etc.
I’m not condoning illegal immigration, but they are like everyone else - some do excellent work, some are lazy and lack imagination.
This is not an issue with the people that did the labor on the foundations. Either the metal used to attach the tower to the foundation was inferior or the way it was tied to the foundation was not to the design of the engineering.
I know. I was responding to the one who quipped that the substandard work must have been done by illegals.
I’m just pointing the finger at those who are the criminals coming in. Some have no ethics, let alone work ethics.
Engineering-wise why isnt this predictable and guarded against?
And soil-rainfall, as there’s a metric shite-tonne* of concrete in the foundation and lots of bolts as big around as your wrist.
* = typically 10-20 ft. thick, 60 ft. in diameter. 400 cu. yards weigh I g 2 million pounds.
Often the leverage of a tall structure can overturn a pad footing or mass foundation of enormous size. If I was putting these in I would love to have corner sets of drilled caisson foundations as that would use leverage working back against those same forces.
I have put multistory buildings on grade beam systems with crushable forms under the grade beams and just spanned the grade beam system from sets of piers to avoid uplifting soil heave busting up the slabs. The slabs also were on crushable forms when placed and once cured were structural slabs instead of slabs-on-grade.
It appeared to me that there was no anchor bolt failure or reinforcing failure, but instead, the whole pad footing overturned with the tower falling. Either a sub grade failure or a design error. Look at the picture and you can see the concrete foundation still intact and overturned.
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