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 ...
Simply by inspection I have always suspected the foundations of these structures are insufficient since they are mostly just mass and not drilled in or piled structures from what I have seen. Just circular mass reinforced concrete of not a very big radius.
As a newly graduated Civil Engineer I saw the same kind of thing with heater treater units. Upon evaluation I found there is just no way they can stand in a gale with the simple foundations they had. They had to have guy wires but yet they mostly stood because when full of water and oil the CG is lowered. Some did have guy wires indicating prior problems.
There is a lot of sail area and moment arm on these windmill towers and yet they mostly stand up because of friction forces to the earth. Like an oak in waterlogged soil they will blow over when it gets too wet.
It is a gimmick to MAKE MONEY at the expense of the taxpayer!
So, the contractor skimped on the amount of concrete in the foundation. He probably saved himself a $1000 on the concrete from Redimix.
Ping
Way too many in use to call it a design problem. Surely construction or material failt.
All sources of energy have environmental and safety downsides. Environmental groups simply exaggerate the downsides of practical sources that are in use and ignore the downsides of impractical ones. They call the first group dirty and the latter clean even in the cases when the former happen to be cleaner.
im not a degreed engineer but am certain you are correct. The rotational force resulting from wind against those blades on a 300 foot tower has to be enormous.
The new plastic bags are really thick, they charge 6 cents a bag, and the only use is to carry groceries home. The thin ones they banned, worked really well to put dirty diapers in, to pick up dog doo, and line small garbage cans. The cloth ones are fine, but you need to wash them, they get germinated with germs. People get sick.
I voiced my opinion in the self checkout lane Friday last. As the money changer...thing you slide cards in kept screwing up. Someone came over, I asked them why they, as employees of a major corporation, don’t tell the State or Fed to shove it on the bag law....I live in WA, and demand it end and let them give away the free useful bags once more. They are easier to store too, and are also recyclable. Just don’t let China use them, THEY are the ones throwing them in the ocean.
It was just like that in tone but with more colorful language thrown in. I had to slide a dollar bill into the thing to pay for TWO FLIPPIN BAGS, after paying with my debit card.
The carbon footprint of the concrete is off the chart. Plus, the energy to dig those out if you ever want to return the land to farmland is fairly large also.
In large general construction for about fifty years. In the recent years in the midwest i saw few failures due to skimping or shorting on the tradesman side. Many more design short comings or “changed conditions” such as underground obstructions or items not found in initial investigations by owner and designer.
I did see shoddy or poor workmanship but that was rejected outright and we are talking later failure.
Please forgive me, world. In find pleasure in this.
Me too.......................
Here’s a brilliant idea, put wind farms in the Gulf of Mexico.
Yes, the Biden administration proposed this.
5.56mm
Anyone seen these? Kind of a different animal. Different axis, supposedly quieter, less turbulence. They’re building or built a factory in Lubbock. https://www.flowerturbines.com/
There’s a huge energy cost to building, maintaining and using these virtue signalling monstrosities.
Can anyone in government do the math? Of is that beyond the reach of people who got their jobs based on sexual kink, pigmentation, left-wing ideology or ‘who their grandfather was’...
Don Quixote sought as a “person of interest”.
looks like the results of the new all inclusive engineering graduates... that footing doesnt look quite thick enough...
Isn’t that from a Frankenstein movie?
If I’m not mistaken, the original one.
I don’t know about the speed but the tips take most of the stress. Was told it’s like cracking a whip with every rotation.
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