Jobs! Jobs! Jobs! The Maintainence Procedure For Your Pet Wind Farms in Wilderness.

[NNadir]

Recently I was informed in this space that a wonderful use for pristine mountain ridges other than mountain top removal by companies who, um, pay Amory Lovins salary, would be to put wind farms there, because, um, "no one lives there."

As a person who is sort of squeamish about using every square centimeter of North America for energy production - and as a nuclear power advocate who notes that the small Oyster Creek Nuclear reactor in my home state, New Jersey produces more energy than all the windmills in Denmark, this on a few acres of land - I objected.

I noted that in order to put wind farms on ridges, one needs roads for trucks, first to bulldoze the land where the windmill will go, and the land on which it will lay during construction, and next to maintain the plant.

Speaking of maintaining a wind turbine before it is abandoned - the average lifetime of windmills in Denmark is about 15 years, less time than it takes a kid to be born and graduate from high school - here are the tools, steps and some notes:

Sequence of events:
1. Overview of procedure and safety briefing
a. Be aware of the whole process as it unfolds
b. Do not stand under tower
c. Be sure that you have an escape route if things go wrong
d. When working near conductors, always check to see if they are energized
e. Do not push on gin pole to lower tower
2. Crew assignment, issue and activate radios, channel 10
3. Check torque on tower anchors.
4. Check grounding cables and tighten
5. Check block and tackle gear
6. Detach breaker box from tower to allow cable slack while lowering.
7. Furl the turbine
8. Check position and condition of jack stand (50’ from tower center)
9. Unspool wire rope – IMPORTANT: do not allow rope to unroll off to the sides as this will kink and twist the rope.
10. Attach clevis to vehicle and wire rope to clevis
11. Remove slack from wire rope
12. Check integrity of wire rope and loop, thimble and wire clips
13. Tighten wire clips on wire rope loop
14. Check security of clevis and hitches and wire rope loop
15. Unhitch turnbuckle to gin pole on front pad
16. Set breaker to “off” position on tower
17. Check surge arrestor with multimeter
18. Check conductors on building breaker box to be sure it is deactivated
19. Disconnect input lines on building breaker box
20. Short 3 wires together on building breaker with wire nut, insulate with electrical tape.
21. Trip tower breaker “on”
22. Be sure turbine breaks within 60 secs.
23. If breaker doesn’t break with 1 min. tip breaker on tower to “off,” wait for wind speed to drop and try again
24. .Backup hoist vehicle slowly about 10 ft
25. While vehicle is backing up, pull back upper guy wire on rear footer to begin tipping tower
26. Monitor tension on side guy wires and loosen with levers if necessary. Keep track of adjustment so it can be easily returned to original condition.
27. As turbine approaches the ground, check position of jack stand and prepare to put wood pole into tail section
28. Monitor blade position and be ready to adjust blades to prevent impact with ground
29. Set turbine on jack stand
30. Check guy wires, thimbles and wire clips for integrity
31. Check torque on tower bolts
32. Remove spinner
33. Front bearing seal integrity (look for grease loss)
34. Check torque on blade attachment bolts (150 ftlbs)
35. Check for cracks on blades.
36. Condition of leading edge protection tape, especially outboard of pitch weight
37. Inspect blade tips
38. What caused the white patch on the one blade?
39. Attach spinner
40. Open nacelle hatch
41. Inspect flanged connection
42. Check torque on turbine mainframe bolts (80 ftlbs)
43. Check rear alternator bearing for seal integrity and grease loss
44. Inspect turbine mainframe for cracks
45. Remove slip ring cover plate.
a. Check brushes for movement in brush holder
b. Check slip rings for arcing damage
c. Look for grease leaking from yaw bearings onto slip rings
d. Inspect electrical connections
e. Reattach cover plate
46. Check tail damper. Some leakage is OK
47. Inspect furling cable, especially at ball end/fork attachment to tail boom
48. Check for cracks or loose hardware on tail boom and fin
49. Check tail pivot pin and its snap ring fasteners
50. Close and secure nacelle
51. Check tower wiring
52. Check furling cable
53. Check furling winch
54. Inspect electrical connections in breaker box
55. Appropriately attach surge arrestor leads
56. Raise tower
57. Slowly raise tower
58. Carefully monitor blades near ground level
59. Monitor guy wire tension on side footers
60. When raised, fasten front footer turnbuckle
61. Disconnect wire rope from vehicle
62. Respool wire rope
63. Switch “off” tower disconnect breaker
64. Reattach wire leads at building breaker box
65. Switch “on” tower breaker box
66. Observe turbine spin-up
67. Check balance of phases with multimeter
68. Check insulation with Megger at controller (Gridtek 10) (500 v; R should be > 50 mega-ohms)
69. Switch “off” building breaker
70. Check wiring connections into and out of Gridtek 10
71. Dust off heat sink on Gridtek 10
72. Switch “on” building breaker
73. Safety loops for turnbuckles
Crew:
4 students, 3 instructors
Position 1: Hoisting vehicle driver
Tools: Radio
Attach wire rope
Check wire clips, thimble
Inspect wire rope
Position 2: Gin pole attachment footer
Observe block and tackle, gin pole
Carefully watch breaker box on tower
Position 3: Riverside footer
Crowbar or lever, radio
Watch tension in guy wire
As tower approaches jack stand retreat to jack stand position and be ready to wrangle the tower onto jack stand
Position 4: Lot-side footer
Crowbar or lever, radio
Watch tension in guy wire
As tower approaches jack stand position, retreat to back tower to help wrangle blades
Position 5: Back of tower, alternator
As machine approaches ground, be ready to position blades to prevent ground contact
Position 6: Jack stand position
Wrangle tower onto stand
Position 7: Back of tower, tail
As turbine approaches ground, position 2x4 under tail
All positions:
Once turbine is down retreat to alternator to begin maintenance review...

http://ace.cte.umt.edu/documents/MaintenanceProcedure.pdf

This of course, is a small wind turbine at a small school, where presumbably they train wind turbine maintainence workers.

Everybody here who thinks that backpackers are going to do this job, raise their keyboard in a solar powered keyboard salute!

No, it's going to be trucks that service turbines in the forest, trucks needing roads.

Somebody send out for Weyerhauser. We need some folks who are good at clear cutting.

[Laelth]

1. Wind power BLOWS. n/t

:dem:

-Laelth

[NNadir]

4. I especially like #46: "Some leakage is OK..."

...unless of course, it explodes into flame, in which case it's a good thing to have those wind farm roads for fire vehicles.

[TxRider]

8. You mean like Chernobyl, or Three Mile Island

Or the Chalk River reactor meltdowns.

Or the fire at the Lubmin nuclear power plant.

Or the Mihama nuclear plant leak

Or the Tokaimura nuclear fuel processing leak

No machine of man lasts forever or is perfect.

[Nederland]

14. Interesting List

Do you realize that only example in your list that is relevant is Chernobyl? All the other "accidents" released either no or trivial amounts of radiation. One item on your list, the Lubmin fire, has absolutely nothing to do with nuclear power. That event was a fire caused by faulty wiring--the kind of thing that probably happens thousands of times every year in commercial and residential buildings.

[TxRider]

20. Missed the point

Windmill fires don't release radiation at all.

Point is all things built by man wear out or have issues. Much less potential for disaster with a windmill than nuclear power plant or fuel facility.

[Nederland]

25. Much less potential?

Even when you add in all the deaths caused by Chernobyl (which you shouldn't if you are debating nuclear power in the US), the odds of a person dying in an airplane crash or by being struck by lightning are far higher than the odds of dying from radiation released from a nuclear reactor. I simply don't understand why you consider that "potential for disaster" unacceptable. I wonder if you built ten million windmills in the US what the odds of a hiker dying as a result of a tower exploding would be? I wouldn't at all be surprised if the odds actually ended up being higher than the odds of dying from radiation exposure from a commercial nuclear reactor.

[kristopher]

26. Why should we count any accidents with turbines then?

If the specific failure that was Chernobyl is excluded on the basis of "lessons learned", then why should we apply a different standard to wind turbines.

While the specific technological failure (largely design) that resulted in that catastrophe wouldn't be duplicated here, that is no guarantee that other failures can not happen. The complexity of design and the toxicity of the by-products ensure that people are going to be leery of nuclear power.

And you can't isolate the US like you have. There is a relationship between our stance on nuclear power and a global move towards or away from nuclear power; like it or not we are a leader in selecting the technology we go forward with. So the risks are going to be magnified not only numerically, but also in terms of quality control and nuclear weapons proliferation.

The REAL question is why are you so hell bent on nuclear power? It offers no advantages when looked at from a performance basis. The baseload canard is just that - a false argument put forth by those that either don't have a full grasp of the problem or those with an ulterior motive.

What COMPELS you to reject renewables?

http://www.rsc.org/publishing/journals/EE/article.asp?doi=b809990c

Energy Environ. Sci., 2009, 2, 148 - 173, DOI: 10.1039/b809990c
Review of solutions to global warming, air pollution, and energy security

Mark Z. Jacobson

This paper reviews and ranks major proposed energy-related solutions to global warming, air pollution mortality, and energy security while considering other impacts of the proposed solutions, such as on water supply, land use, wildlife, resource availability, thermal pollution, water chemical pollution, nuclear proliferation, and undernutrition.

Nine electric power sources and two liquid fuel options are considered. The electricity sources include solar-photovoltaics (PV), concentrated solar power (CSP), wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, wave, tidal, nuclear, and coal with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology. The liquid fuel options include corn-ethanol (E85) and cellulosic-E85. To place the electric and liquid fuel sources on an equal footing, we examine their comparative abilities to address the problems mentioned by powering new-technology vehicles, including battery-electric vehicles (BEVs), hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (HFCVs), and flex-fuel vehicles run on E85.

Twelve combinations of energy source-vehicle type are considered. Upon ranking and weighting each combination with respect to each of 11 impact categories, four clear divisions of ranking, or tiers, emerge.

Tier 1 (highest-ranked) includes wind-BEVs and wind-HFCVs.
Tier 2 includes CSP-BEVs, geothermal-BEVs, PV-BEVs, tidal-BEVs, and wave-BEVs.
Tier 3 includes hydro-BEVs, nuclear-BEVs, and CCS-BEVs.
Tier 4 includes corn- and cellulosic-E85.

Wind-BEVs ranked first in seven out of 11 categories, including the two most important, mortality and climate damage reduction. Although HFCVs are much less efficient than BEVs, wind-HFCVs are still very clean and were ranked second among all combinations.

Tier 2 options provide significant benefits and are recommended.

Tier 3 options are less desirable. However, hydroelectricity, which was ranked ahead of coal-CCS and nuclear with respect to climate and health, is an excellent load balancer, thus recommended.

The Tier 4 combinations (cellulosic- and corn-E85) were ranked lowest overall and with respect to climate, air pollution, land use, wildlife damage, and chemical waste. Cellulosic-E85 ranked lower than corn-E85 overall, primarily due to its potentially larger land footprint based on new data and its higher upstream air pollution emissions than corn-E85.

Whereas cellulosic-E85 may cause the greatest average human mortality, nuclear-BEVs cause the greatest upper-limit mortality risk due to the expansion of plutonium separation and uranium enrichment in nuclear energy facilities worldwide. Wind-BEVs and CSP-BEVs cause the least mortality.

The footprint area of wind-BEVs is 2–6 orders of magnitude less than that of any other option. Because of their low footprint and pollution, wind-BEVs cause the least wildlife loss.

The largest consumer of water is corn-E85. The smallest are wind-, tidal-, and wave-BEVs.

The US could theoretically replace all 2007 onroad vehicles with BEVs powered by 73000–144000 5 MW wind turbines, less than the 300000 airplanes the US produced during World War II, reducing US CO2 by 32.5–32.7% and nearly eliminating 15000/yr vehicle-related air pollution deaths in 2020.

In sum, use of wind, CSP, geothermal, tidal, PV, wave, and hydro to provide electricity for BEVs and HFCVs and, by extension, electricity for the residential, industrial, and commercial sectors, will result in the most benefit among the options considered. The combination of these technologies should be advanced as a solution to global warming, air pollution, and energy security. Coal-CCS and nuclear offer less benefit thus represent an opportunity cost loss, and the biofuel options provide no certain benefit and the greatest negative impacts.

[TxRider]

28. Yes, but

How would it compare to thousands of reactors and supporting industries and not just the few we have.

I'm not a big anti nuke, but in my experience it is quite expensive and the larger the scale of implementation the larger the risks get.

And if a tower does melt down, it's fair bit less of a catastrophe than a nuclear plant melting down. You just put up a new turbine, you don't have to make a radiation exclusion zone for 100 years.

I don't trust the industry from mining, to processing to power plants to be safe. Especially if we built out thousands of nuclear power plants, and I have yet to see one that didn't cost many times what was projected and approved to build.

The more recent example was one I used to drive by a lot, that cost 5x what was proposed and approved.

[NNadir]

17. Bull. The anti-nukes couldn't care less when a fossil fuel plant kills by operating normally.

They get their fat asses in a wedgie whenever there is a leak at a nuclear plant, even if the number of fatalities or injuries is zero.

I'll bet that zero anti-nukes making a big deal about chalk river leaks ever for even a second thought about giving up his or her car when the Texas City refinery exploded injuring and killing more than 100, or when the piper alpha platform blew up.

Nuclear energy need not be perfect to be vastly superior to all the stuff anti-nukes ignore and/or don't care about. It merely needs to be vastly superior which it is.

In the 50 year history of commercial nuclear power there has been just one major accident leading to a large loss of life, Chernobyl. By contrast nearly ever exajoule scale energy industry kills every year at a Chernobyl rate, oil, gas, coal and hydroelectric.

There is not one person on this website who whines insipidly about things like Mihama leaks who even knows what the Banqiao dam disaster was. It killed a quarter of a million people in the mid seventies. (We were two centimeters from a worse disaster at Glen Canyon here in 1983, but the number of anti-nukes who demand shutting hydroelectric stations is zero.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/7/27/23239/9852">A Tale of Two Centimeters: The Near Collapse of the Colorado River Dam System in 1983.

[TxRider]

21. I thought we were talking about evil wind power here?

Not evil gasoline power that they want to replace.

Lets hear about the major accidents and massive loss of life in wind and solar power.

[madokie]

22. He's a fraudster

simple as that, talks a game but has not yet provided us with any of his peer reviewed papers, nada, zip, nothing but air.

[Berry Cool]

2. Oh, here we go again with the NIMBY patrol.

"Every square centimeter"...oh please.

Boy, oh boy does someone really want to convince people that wind farms are tools of Satan. Oh, because you know, they will need to have TRUCKS and ROADS around them. :scared:

Sorry. Not gonna wash with me.

[TxRider]

3. What a load

A) The average lifetime of a wind turbine is over 15 years.
B) Most accessible ridges have already had roads cut to them.
C) You don't clear cut for a road.
C) Lets see the maintenance manual on a nuke plant in text.
D) Even with turbine replacement cost included wind is cheaper than nuclear.

[NNadir]

5. Well, I publicly CALCULATED this using readily available Danish energy agency data.

Of course, I never met a "renewables will save us advocate" who has any respect for data.

The Danish energy has an EXCEL spreadsheet on their website that reports on the service history of EVERY Danish windmill.

The data is here: http://193.88.185.141/Graphics/Energi_i_tal_og_kort/energidata_kort/stamdataregister_vindmoeller/AnlaegProdTilNettet20081219.xls

All gas greenwashing "renewables will save us" advocates should feel, as always, free to ignore the data on the grounds it is unpleasant.

I explained how to use EXCEL functions to extract the mean lifetime of Danish windmills here:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/12/28/185825/42">The Operational Lifetime of Wind Turbines in Denmark: Government Data.

I have then used this data and the Excel MEAN function - not to be mean but to make a serious point - to determine what the mean lifetime of decomissioned Danish windmills is. It is 15.9 years, carrying one insignificant figure, or 15 years and 10 months.

I have used the MEDIAN function to determine that half of the windmills lasted less than 16 years and that half lasted more than 16 years.

I have used the MAX function to determine that the longest surviving windmill lasted for 28 years.

There was only ONE windmill that lasted 28 years, the 22 kW unit manufactured by Kongsted described on Row 188 of the spreadsheet for decommissioned units.

Now.

I also had some stuff here:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/12/29/12649/267">More Fun With Danish Energy Agency Data: A Diary About Me.

Now back to our regularly scheduled consumerist oblivious denial...

[TxRider]

6. No, you didn't.

You calculated a lifetime for a specific subset of wind turbines, the specific subset of turbines that would yeild the lowest average lifetime.

To get to the real lifetime would take a tad more effort and honesty.

Reality is more like 20-25 years to those that don't ignore the actual data.

[joshcryer]

9. Oh God, I got egg on my face badly, you did not calculate average wind turbine life for all turbines

Only those which failed.

[kristopher]

12. Not even those that failed.

Go back and review that thread - most were just replaced with larger, newer units.

"Denmark was the first country to actively support wind repowering, in part because wind turbine installation began in the early 1980s, so a large number of aging, small (<75 kW) wind turbines exist throughout the country. Denmark recognized that these smaller, aging turbines were an obstacle to new project development, and that removing and repowering those turbines would require an overt and explicit incentive. Denmark’s repowering program has led to the repowering of two-thirds of the oldest turbines in the country.</p>

Denmark’s first incentive program for repowering wind operated from April 2001 – December 2003. For turbines smaller than 100 kW, "repowering certificates" allowed owners to install three times the capacity removed and receive an additional feed-in tariff price of 2.3 cents/kWh for the first 12,000 full load hours (5 years) of the enlarged wind project. For turbines in the 100-150 kW size range, owners could install twice the capacity removed and receive the same treatment.

As a result of this program, 1,480 turbines totaling 121.7 MW were replaced with 272 new turbines totaling 331.5 MW. Some owners of older wind projects also decided to decommission their projects and sell their repowering certificates to other wind developers.

Denmark has continued to encourage wind repowering through a policy enacted via the Energy Policy Agreement of March 2004. ..."

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x224893#225098

Just scramble the eggs for breakfast.

[joshcryer]

16. He's the first hit for "lifetime wind turbines."

What a joke.

Need to perform a Weibull analysis on the data, post it on DU, get 200 recs to bump him off of that spot with correct data.

[Javaman]

24. Using caps, really helps.

:rofl:

[postulater]

7. OK, I give.

"mountain top removal by companies who, um, pay Amory Lovins salary,"

Who pays Amory Lovins salary? and is this bad?

I remember his book from the seventies but haven't followed him since.

[kristopher]

11. He just tries to slander Lovins because Lovins recognized nuclear as part of the "hard" energy path

Lovins has continued his work on moving us to distributed generation - the "soft" energy path, as he calls it.

The Republican nuclear industry and their local spokesperson just can't get him out of their heads.

[TheWraith]

13. BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Dow, Ford, GM, Royal Dutch/Shell, Sun Oil, and Wal-Mart.

Among others. He greenwashes for big business, primarily the fossil fuel industry.

[kristopher]

15. As you can see "Wraith" is another diehard nuclear supporter.

Calling the fact that Lovins works on energy efficiency programs for a wide group of clients "greenwashing" is a ridiculous use of the term.

Nukenuts hate him and here is more of why:

http://www.grist.org/article/nuclear-questions-for-lovins/
Amory Lovins is on the warpath against nuclear power, battling the industry PR push that says nuclear is a viable climate solution. He's got a new report, co-authored with Imran Sheikh, called "The Nuclear Illusion" . Spinning off from that report are a Newsweek article called "Missing the Market Meltdown" and an article on the RMI site called "Forget Nuclear."
(Go to Grist for links to referenced articles)

http://www.newsweek.com/id/137501
Missing the Market Meltdown

Renewable energy is attracting Wall Street but nuclear power isn't. Why? Simple economics.
By Amory B. Lovins
Capitalists have already scuttled Patrick Moore's claimed nuclear revival. New U.S. subsidies of about $13 billion per plant (roughly a plant's capital cost) haven't lured Wall Street to invest. Instead, the decentralized competitors to nuclear power that Moore derides are making more global electricity than nuclear plants are, and are growing 20 to 40 times faster.

In 2007, decentralized renewables worldwide attracted $71 billion in private capital. Nuclear got zero. Why? Economics. The nuclear construction costs that Moore omits are astronomical and soaring; low fuel costs will soon rise two-to fivefold. "Negawatts"—saved electricity—cost five to 10 times less and are getting cheaper. So are most renewables. Negawatts and "micro-power"— renewables other than big hydro, and cogenerating electricity together with useful heat—are also at or near customers, avoiding grid costs, losses and failures (which cause 98 to 99 percent of blackouts).

The unreliability of renewable energy is a myth, while the unreliability of nuclear energy is real. Of all U.S. nuclear plants built, 21 percent were abandoned as lemons; 27 percent have failed for a year or more at least once. Even successful reactors must close for refueling every 17 months for 39 days. And when shut by grid failure, they can't quickly restart. Wind farms don't do that.

Variable but forecastable renewables (wind and solar cells) are very reliable when integrated with each other, existing supplies and demand. For example, three German states were more than 30 percent wind-powered in 2007—and more than 100 percent in some months. Mostly renewable power generally needs less backup than utilities already bought to combat big coal and nuclear plants' intermittence.

Micropower delivers a sixth of total global electricity, a third of all new electricity and from a sixth to more than half of all electricity in 12 industrial countries (in the United States it's only 6 percent). In 2006, the global net capacity added by nuclear power was only 83 percent of that added by solar cells, 10 percent that of wind power and 3 percent that of micropower. China's distributed renewables grew to seven times its nuclear capacity and grew seven times faster. In 2007, the United States, China and Spain each added more wind capacity than the world added nuclear capacity. Wind power added 30 percent of new U.S. and 40 percent of EU capacity, because it's two to three times cheaper than new nuclear power.
Which part of this doesn't Moore understand?

The punch line: nuclear expansion buys two to 10 times less climate protection per dollar, far slower than its winning competitors. Spending a dollar on new nuclear power rather than on negawatts thus has a worse climate effect than spending that dollar on new coal power. Attention, Dr. Moore: you're making climate change worse.

They can't argue facts so they resort to typical Republican tactics to support the new pillar of Republican energy policy.

[TheWraith]

27. He bolts solar panels onto Walmart roofs and calls it green. What do you call that?

And all I did was copy off the list of companies that he himself admits he works for.

[kristopher]

29. Why do you need to make false statements?

He worked with WalMart on increasing the energy efficiency of their trucking fleet, a move that leverages the "WalMart Effect" and results in an improvement of energy efficiency in our entire trucking fleet.

What have you done for the world today besides fabricate falsehoods?

[dhpgetsit]

10. Yeah, mountauntop removal, strip mining and THEN wind farms.

Earth First! Log the other planets later.

[Systematic Chaos]

18. I see the unrec fucksticks are out in force fucksticking with unrecs.

Because wind power is just sofa king awesome.

[madokie]

19. It beats the hell out of nuclear power

We'll be not building any more nuke plants here and that's that. As the ones we have reach their designed life times they will be shut down. future generations are going to be left with the clean up of all the waste with sections of this country not inhabitable, the sections where the mines and the nuke plants sit today will be tainted for many many years.
Let me see I think I unrec'd this last night if not I go now to do just that. :-)

[Javaman]

23. awww, another complainer of the unrec function.

life sucks.

:rofl:

[Ready4Change]

30. A few acres?

First: I'm not against nuclear, but that plant is a tad more than a few acres. (I'm trying to find a pic that is small enough to show here.)


Second: lets see the same list of steps required to maintain Oyster Creek, keeping in mind it was built in 1969, and it's original 40 year lifetime was just increased for an additional 20 years. I suspect it's a bit more than 73 steps. (Or at least I hope so.)

Third: the roads needed for ridge top wind aren't great, but they are a LOT better than mountain top removal for coal. I know which I'd prefer to have next door.

I'm ok with nuclear, when it's done well. But I'm also ok with wind, again, when done well. My position is that with both together we get away from coal faster than with nuclear alone.

[Nihil]

31. Thank you.

> I'm ok with nuclear, when it's done well.
> But I'm also ok with wind, again, when done well.
> My position is that with both together we get away
> from coal faster than with nuclear alone.

That is fair and is a welcome change from the "but *this* might
happen if *your* one goes wrong" bitching that tends to take
over these threads.
:hi:

[TxRider]

32. From what I have seen

From basic calculations, nuclear power plants require about 1/4 to 1/3 the acreage of solar power per watt produced.

Wind power at least on the plains here really takes a lot less acreage, as the land is farmed or grazed right around and under them. Probably the least amount of land use per megawatt.