"Safe and effective clean energy!"
Wait. Who cleans up the mess? What IF someone had died?
“...this was an isolated incident as turbine malfunctions are rare."
Liar. A simple web search tells me just the opposite:
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=wind+turbine+malfunctions&atb=v273-1&ia=web
“what caused part of a wind turbine and its blades to plummet to the ground”
Uh... Gravity?
I believe the rate of structural failure is very low compared to lots of other industrial installations.
That’s not the problem with them.
So wind turbines are “safe and effective!”
They said that about the clot shots, too.
Just like they said they wanted abortions to be “safe, legal, and rare.”
I’m beginning to detect a trend here...
When the blades do reach their service life and need to be removed the transport and disposal costs are enormous. (oh, and they can't be recycled)
Safe, effective, dependable.....🐴💩
There are thousands of these pieces of garbage littering Southern California.
Oregon wind farm sees blades, bolts fly off as failures mount: report
August 29, 202211-story tall blades flew the full length of a football field and plowed a 4-feet deep furrow in a wheat field. The heavy-duty bolts that kept the blade attached to the tower scattered like shrapnel.
Your Expensive Energy FutureA new report has revealed the unreliability of a major Oregon wind farm, discovered after a blade from a windmill detached and flew across the field.
According to The Oregonian, in January, a delivery driver found some broken, industrial-size bolts on the ground near one of Portland General Electric’s towering wind turbines but did not know who to tell and used it as a paperweight.
On Feb 1, 2022 at 2:11 am, one of the turbine’s 11-story tall blades flew the full length of a football field and plowed a 4-feet deep furrow in a wheat field. The heavy-duty bolts that kept the blade attached to the tower scattered like shrapnel.
PGE’s flagship wind facility, which opened 15 years ago to expand green energy technology in Oregon and nationally had other warning signs as well according to the outlet but it wasn’t until the blade breakdown that the company took action at Biglow Canyon, one of Oregon’s largest wind farms, and shut down all 217 turbines for testing, keeping some out of service for four months.
Though industry groups insist that wind farms are very safe and major malfunctions are rare, wind farms are growing older and components are aging.
That's one of the things that REALLY galls me. If you open a new surface coal mine, you have to pay HUGE surety bonds up front to make sure the site is reclaimed ten, twenty or more years down the road.
Wind farms put millions of tons of concrete in the ground, erect 200 foot towers, and put huge blades on each tower. What happens when millions of those horrible monstrosities despoiling our beautiful country all reach the end of their lives? Do you think the companies that bought them or manufactured them will still be around?
Of course not. They will have gone out of business and no reclamation bonds were paid. So those infernal machines will be blighting our landscape for 1,000 years until they fall apart. The millions of tons of concrete in the ground will just be abandoned and never go away.
If we had a level playing field, the damn companies building and operating these infernal machines would have to pay their surety bonds up front. But that won't happen because the green lobby strong-arms Congress to make sure it doesn't happen. So the costs of windmills are artificially low and do not include decommissioning and reclamation costs.
Maybe a really big bird got whoomphed.
Ping
Looking at the wind turbines, most of then do not seem to work, just standing standstill.
There is no good way to recycle them, so there is some huge landfill being filled up with them.
They do not last too long as the plastic blades hitting birds and other particles disintegrate quickly.
There have been some spectacular failures before, but those are indeed not that common.
Mamma’s don’t let your children play around windmills.
Metal fatigue in the bolts that hold the tower sections... it must have been like sitting beside a popcorn maker when they all blew off, essentially at once. It is the Achilles heal of all IWTs....
#1’s DuckDuckGo link is certainly telling. Besides the hundreds of blade fails and fires, in one of the articles is this: “”Each wind turbine costs in excess of £2 million and generates an estimated income of more than £500,000 per year.””
This so-called ‘generated income’ includes all the massive subsidies. Just like the solar power scam, every subsidy is TAKEN from taxpayers. Without the massive theft (taxpayer $$$) there is no ‘market’ for wind or solar. Only the massive leviathan of centralized government can make this happen.
How much energy is expended in obtaining raw materials, manufacturing, transporting, building, and servicing each of these? All of those factors should be considered in determining their ‘carbon footprint’. Also, how much energy is expended in clearing land and building roads for these?
What are their environmental impacts (e.g. killing of birds, loss of carbon uptake by trees cleared to make room for them etc.)? How much energy is expended in replacing them and disposal of the old structures?
Whose landfill gets filled up by that thing?
did it hit a low-flying UFO?
The wind turbine had eaten its fill of birds and decided to lie down and take a nap.
My aunt remembers this one built in 1977 on the High Plains near Clayton NM. Removed in 1981. She said you could hear the “Swoosh, swoosh, swoosh” all the time.
https://windmillstech.com/an-overview-of-some-historic-wind-turbines-part-2/
The Mod Series
The wind turbines developed in the mod series were very expensive and meant to be a technology drivers.
Mod 0A
Mod 0 and its improved variant Mod 0A were developed by a contractor Westinghouse. The Mod 0A used a two-blade rotor 38 m in diameter and had a downwind configuration to drive a 200 kW generator. The Wind turbine was installed in 1977 in Clayton, New Mexico in a small municipality.
The Turbine had a lattice tower and flaps on the partial span of the rotor for speed control. It was in operation for 4 years until it was removed in 1981.