Posted on 10/10/2009 11:13:58 PM PDT by bruinbirdman
Blade on a wind turbine in Sheffield has broken in strong winds for the second time in 15 months.
Manufacturers of the 190ft high turbine, one of three owned by Sheffield University, are now investigating the damage at the site close to the city's Parkway link road to the M1.
A blade on the same turbine was broken 15 months ago and residents who live close to the site at Catcliffe, near Rotherham, have expressed fears that they could pose a danger to local people.
Martin Oldfield said : "I'm worried about them from a safety point of view as they are quite close to the road and a supermarket where a lot of people go.
"There are workmen up there now starting work on repairing it but now that it's happened a second time clearly there is a serious issue.
"There was one bright side - as soon as the blade snapped off the TV signal instantly improved and I could see all my programmes properly again."
A Sheffield University spokeswoman said : "It is not clear why this happened and an investigation is being carried out by the wind turbine manufacturers.
"We are clearly concerned and have requested that the wind turbines are not put back into service until the suppliers and independent consultants have carried out their investigations and can confirm the safety of the equipment."
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
These blades don’t typically break. We have thousands of windmills in Germany and maintenance-wise, they are built to last.
Until turbines are greatly improved, wind power SUX!
1: They are wholly unreliable, even in areas where the wind is relatively steady, due to maintenance downtime and unforeseen events.
2: They are extremely unsightly where it is most effective (at the foot of mountain ranges, since it interrupts the view).
3: They are more effective at killing massive numbers of songbirds and bats than cats and kids with pellet guns combined!
There are 3 reasons just off the top of my head. I haven’t even touched on the area required, the infrastructure needed, or any of several hundred major considerations.
There’s a fairly impressive wind farm in Indiana, with many of the turbines visible close up along I-65 between Lafayette and Indianapolis.
Just one thing, though. In the four or five times I’ve been by there, I’ve never seen them turning. Honest!
Your opinion.
They break. Over-speed them, or buffet them with very gusty winds, and they’ll break.
The failure rate isn’t high, but the number of turbines installed recently is large, and utilities and operators will start to develop failure analysis studies and statistics in a few years.
Ice and snow build-up on the blades distorts the airflow over the blades and can result in unplanned stresses on the blades.
We had one turbine in southeastern Wyoming launch a blade. You don’t want to be near where they land...
Bush’s fault.
Green jobs, fixin’ them thangs.
Have you ever actually HEARD wind turbines in action? Have you actually even SEEN a wind turbine (other than on TV?). If so, then you may have a valid opinion.
Otherwise, get a clue, FRiend. Do some research OTHER than what the media and enviro-weenies want you to hear.
Wind turbines are noisy, obtrusive and unreliable. There is also a noticeable pile of dead birds/bats in their radius.
Wishing it weren’t so is no solution. Wind power is not viable yet.
If anyone’s seen the video of the entire turbine that self destructed in Holland, I’ll bet there’s some laundry to be done immediately after one of these events.
Wind energy is not the be-all end-all solution, never said it was, but it can be part of the solution.
This paper examines the growth of government during this century as a result of giving women the right to vote. Using cross-sectional time-series data for 1870 to 1940, we examine state government expenditures and revenue as well as voting by U.S. House and Senate state delegations and the passage of a wide range of different state laws. Suffrage coincided with immediate increases in state government expenditures and revenue and more liberal voting patterns for federal representatives, and these effects continued growing over time as more women took advantage of the franchise. Contrary to many recent suggestions, the gender gap is not something that has arisen since the 1970s, and it helps explain why American government started growing when it did.
Hysteria \Hys*te"ri*a\, n. [NL.: cf. F. hyst['e]rie. See
Hysteric.] (Med.)
A nervous affection, occurring almost exclusively in women,
in which the emotional and reflex excitability is
exaggerated, and the will power correspondingly diminished,
so that the patient loses control over the emotions, becomes
the victim of imaginary sensations, and often falls into
paroxism or fits.
[1913 Webster]
Note: The chief symptoms are convulsive, tossing movements of
the limbs and head, uncontrollable crying and laughing,
and a choking sensation as if a ball were lodged in the
throat. The affection presents the most varied
symptoms, often simulating those of the gravest
diseases, but generally curable by mental treatment
alone. Hysteric
You’ll find links to a couple of tough, productive beauties in your Freepmail (for us scary, technical “Neanderthals” only). Warning: such projects require the efforts of men, and the mere appearance of the resulting products have been known to incite campaigns of libel politics and even public corruption from local, socialist screeching harpies and their pecked-upon sidekicks.
ExxonMobil is hardly alone in running afoul of this law. Over the past two decades, federal officials have brought hundreds of similar cases against energy companies. In July, for example, the Oregon-based electric utility PacifiCorp paid $1.4 million in fines and restitution for killing 232 eagles in Wyoming over the past two years. The birds were electrocuted by poorly-designed power lines.
Yet there is one group of energy producers that are not being prosecuted for killing birds: wind-power companies. And wind-powered turbines are killing a vast number of birds every year.
A July 2008 study of the wind farm at Altamont Pass, Calif., estimated that its turbines kill an average of 80 golden eagles per year. The study, funded by the Alameda County Community Development Agency, also estimated that about 10,000 birds—nearly all protected by the migratory bird act—are being whacked every year at Altamont.
Altamont's turbines, located about 30 miles east of Oakland, Calif., kill more than 100 times as many birds as Exxon's tanks, and they do so every year. But the Altamont Pass wind farm does not face the same threat of prosecution, even though the bird kills at Altamont have been repeatedly documented by biologists since the mid-1990s.
The number of birds killed by wind turbines is highly variable. And biologists believe Altamont, which uses older turbine technology, may be the worst example. But that said, the carnage there likely represents only a fraction of the number of birds killed by windmills. Michael Fry of the American Bird Conservancy estimates that U.S. wind turbines kill between 75,000 and 275,000 birds per year. Yet the Justice Department is not bringing cases against wind companies.
"Somebody has given the wind industry a get-out-of-jail-free card," Mr. Fry told me. "If there were even one prosecution," he added, the wind industry would be forced to take the issue seriously.
According to the American Wind Energy Association, the industry's trade association, each megawatt of installed wind-power results in the killing of between one and six birds per year. At the end of 2008, the U.S. had about 25,000 megawatts of wind turbines.
By 2030, environmental and lobby groups are pushing for the U.S. to be producing 20% of its electricity from wind. Meeting that goal, according to the Department of Energy, will require the U.S. to have about 300,000 megawatts of wind capacity, a 12-fold increase over 2008 levels. If that target is achieved, we can expect some 300,000 birds, at the least, to be killed by wind turbines each year.
On its Web site, the Wind Energy Association says that bird kills by wind turbines are a "very small fraction of those caused by other commonly accepted human activities and structures—house cats kill an estimated one billion birds annually." That may be true, but it is not much of a defense. When cats kill birds, federal law doesn't require marching them to our courthouses to hold them responsible.
During the late 1980s and early '90s, Rob Lee was one of the Fish and Wildlife Service's lead law-enforcement investigators on the problem of bird kills in Western oil fields. Now retired and living in Lubbock, Texas, Mr. Lee tells me that solving the problem in the oil fields "was easy and cheap." The oil companies only had to put netting over their tanks and waste facilities.
Why aren't wind companies prosecuted for killing eagles and other birds? "The fix here is not easy or cheap," Mr. Lee told me. He added that he doesn't expect to see any prosecutions of the politically correct wind industry.
This is a double standard that more people—and not just bird lovers—should be paying attention to. In protecting America's wildlife, federal law-enforcement officials are turning a blind eye to the harm done by "green" energy.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203706604574376543308399048.html
Since you know alot about them please tell me how they interface into the grid. On a gusty day when turning do the peaking plants dial back on their output? I have always wondered since you have to rely on the wind are they just creating excess capacity that is not needed?
Most of the large environmental groups are now agents of the political Left and its global warming hoax. The fact that they are silent on the killing of flying wildlife is evidence of that.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.