Gaia is a cruel prankster.
A $200-million wind farm in northern New Brunswick is frozen solid, cutting off a potential supply of renewable energy for NB Power.
The 25-kilometre stretch of wind turbines, located 70 kilometres northwest of Bathurst, N.B. has been completely shutdown for several weeks due to heavy ice covering the blades.
h/t Dan T.
Mr. Potatohead (3:41 PM) said “It’s not the fault of Suzuki, Gore et al. The blame lies squarely on the shoulders of the politicians. …”.
Yeah, and Bernie Madoff was just having a little bit of fun!
Give your head a shake. This is as criminal as it gets!!
Phantom, the surface area is enormous, so heating is out of the question. As for de-icing fluid, not really possible given that they are in essentially constant motion.
There is no de-icing of the Horn’s Reef windmills to my knowledge. That’s why ice-throwing can be a problem. They also don’t usually get winters cold enough for the salt water to freeze. Gotta love that Gulf Stream, compared to the Labrador Current which hits Atlantic Canada right in the chops.
Cascadian, all that a wind mill does is produce mechanical energy by turning a shaft. This is fine if all you want is mechanical energy to run a very old style water pump. But if you want electricity, you have to do a lot more. It’s back to Faraday’s Laws and Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetic induction.
So you have to have a generator and converter to turn that into electricity. You can only convert it through magnetic fields, so you have to have enough electricity coming into the generator and converter to raise a magnetic field and charge the converter. Otherwise, the turbine just spins and doesn’t do anything. The gearbox also needs electricity to run. So if you have a shut down turbine, you need to run the gearbox to get the turbine out of a locked position.
It’s very similar to your car. The motor won’t turn over by itself. You need a charge into the starter motor to turn the engine over mechanically. Running the starter motor means you need a stored source of electricity, the battery. In the case of turbines, they draw their startup current from the grid they will be supplying. In the case of the wind turbine, you don’t need energy to turn the blades; I’m presuming the wind does that. But you need outside supply of electricity to start up all of its electrical equipment.
I don’t know how much electricity that is or what the inrush is. However, the manufacturers such as GE or Vesta know it very well, as well as the ongoing operating load.
Nuclear power plants also can’t black start themselves. Simply pulling out the control rods in a reactor doesn’t start any generation because there’s nothing at that point to turn over the main circulation pumps (they are about 200,000 HP synchronous electric motors, at least they are on that scale). And each reactor has four of them. So the nuclear plant has to draw power from the grid to which it is connected to provide the excitation and inrush current for the circulation pump motors (lots of other things too, but those are the main load). The backup diesel generators at a nuclear station are not to allow the reactor to start up. They are there to power all the control systems and ensure that the plant’s shutdown systems are all fully powered. The typical requirement in a nuclear plant is about 100% redundancy for diesel generators. Most plants have four of them, and one can fill the minimum requirement, I believe, though it might be two.
Once the plant is running, there’s a huge surplus of power. But typical for any thermal plant, internal consumption is about 5% of total output.
So when Ontario had its great electricity blackout in 2003, the only plants that managed to stay operating were the hydro damns, the coal stations, the few gas plants and the four nuclear reactors that managed to go into standby mode before grid rejection occurred. All the remaining nuclear plants could only start up after the grid had been restored.
In Ontario’s case, it had to largely restart its system on its own and it took nearly two days for the grid to come back up. (Which took a truly ferocious amount of work by the generators and Hydro One in particular.) In the case of New York, Ohio and Michigan, they could restart quite quickly because they were all surrounded by electrical systems which were not blacked out.
Simple solution to the icing on the blades, get canuckguy to lick them clean.
(No sarcasm intended.)
“Simple solution to the icing on the blades, get canuckguy to lick them clean.”
Stop it. It’s far too late tonight to be rolling on the floor laughing hysterically. Now I just have to mop up all this coffee. And clean the screen, and…
POWinCA – now that made me laugh. What a green solution that is. It is surprising a greeny didn’t come up with that solution. Twits/morons/idiots.
Out of curiosity I thought I’d look at BC hydro’s web site and it was not what I needed to see at this time of night. I’m sure I’ve got some drugs around here to calm me down as right now I feel the urge to go out watermelon hunting. Check out:
http://www.bchydro.com/news/articles/press_releases/2010/new_act_powers_bc_forward.html
I had no idea there was such a thing as a BC “clean energy act” which is essentially designed to cripple the BC economy. Maybe the BC communist party replaced Campbell’s brain with one from a Suzuki clone as right now I can’t see any difference between the BC lieberals and the commies. Maybe there’s too many bald eagles in BC and it’s impacting on the Native Indian salmon fishery and bird blenders are a way of decreasing eagle numbers.
BC Hydro wants to hear from the people of BC about its plans and it’s time to let them know at:
integrated.resource.planning@bchydro.com
You can find out more about the proposed lunacy at http://bchydro.com/IRP
At least they consider hydroelectric power clean energy but their plans are to reduce power consumption. That means massive increases in rates as BC Hydro’s costs certainly aren’t going down. I guess one of the things I can do to dissipate some of the rage is start planning now for what I can do for the next human achievement hour. A good opportunity to give my house electrical system a test — I’ve got 200 amps coming in and will see if I can use 190 Kwh during human achievement hour. Just wish I had some of my old power hungry PDP-11’s which my wife made me give away (at least they went to a good home).
“We can’t control the weather.”
“…some kind of burner array could be easily affixed to the leading edge of each blade” Wouldn’t work, the wind would blow out the burners. 😉
Anyone who has run aircraft in the far north knows how important keeping the head in the mechanics is.
Bathurst has plenty of timber around. Why not build a bonfire at the base of every windmill?
This is a story by greg weston that dearly needs to be looked into by someone with a science back ground.Check out statements by david coon the genius? behind nb power.Here is a long link to the story.
dailygleaner.com – Breaking News, New Brunswick, CanadaCOMMUNICATIONS N.B.. Just a day after coming agonizingly close to a Canada …
dailygleaner.canadaeast.com
cgh, I hadn’t considered surface area to be heated in my thinking. Usually with aircraft they heat the leading edge and the rest pretty much cracks off in the breeze, but with an 80 ft blade that could lead to some healthy weight imbalances as ice comes off unevenly. Leave one blade out of three loaded for a couple of turns and you’d probably hear a big kaboom from the main bearing.
Just goes to show how very not ready for prime time this tech is, and gee whiz they freakin’ went and installed it anyway, billions of dollars worth.
Tax cut now. Power must be taken from the hands of these dangerous children.
It kind of makes you wonder. For those of you who believe in God, if this is His way of telling us we’re going down the wrong track with respect to green energy.
Why can’t they just switch over to solar? Oh wait. The solar farms are buried in snow
Now that they’re not turning, maybe they could be put to another, better use, like crucifixes. Hmmmmm……
And another one escapes the group think mob:
A heretic in Al Gore’s backyard.
ORNL Scientist Tells The Truth About Global Warming
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2011/02/15/ornl-scientist-tells-the-truth-about-global-warming/
Phantom: “a big kaboom…”
No bloody kidding.
Ontario Hydro did a large series of safety tests on wind turbines in the 1970s. These were just little 150 kW machines, not the 1-3 MW jobs we have today, so their blade length was trivial compared to the modern monsters.
OH found that the MEDIAN (not average) throw distance on blade separation from the hub was nearly 500 metres. At a weight of about 500 kg, one of them would go through a house roof. In short, we knew all the limitations of wind turbines more than 30 years ago. The key factors were speed of rotation and trajectory on separation.
Now we’re dealing with machines with blades 10 times that mass. They won’t go through the roof, they’ll go through to the sub basement and take everything with it.
Also, no one cares about ice flaking off wings at 30,000 feet. It sublimates or melts long before it hits the ground. But ice flung off a wind turbine blade is going to hit something.
Madasl, I looked at the Weston article. All that Coon said in essence was that he didn’t know anything. (Gee, what a surprise coming from that eco-twit.)
Favill: God is unnecessary in this case. Physics and engineering long ago determined that these things had severe limits. What it shows is the extent to which the greens wanted to come up with an alternative to nuclear, because that’s most of what it’s always been about until the AGW scam came along. Then they also became the preferred alternative to all fossil fuels as well.
Good think they didn’t set up a couple as a test first. Could have queered the whole deal!
Anyone else notice this quote from the article:
“For us, cold and dry weather is good and that’s what’s typical in the region. Cold and wet weather can be a problem without any warmer days to prompt thawing, which has been the case this year.
Umm. The winter I spent in New Brunswick was awfully damp compared to a good prairie winter…