Analysis of Modes of Failures for 1202 Failure Events in Sweden's 624 Wind Turbines 2000-2004.

[NNadir]

This is decided not, um, rote, delusional wind industry hype that wishes to pretend - in spite of much obvious data to the contrary - that the wind industry is reliable, but comes from an academic institution.

Rather the data here comes from a Master's thesis of Johan Ribat at Sweden's premier engineering school, KTH, whose work is also referenced in several publications on the awful performance of the wind industry, obscured as such awful performance may be because of inattention, wishful thinking, hand-waving, marketing and, in my opinion, deliberate fraud.

http://www.ee.kth.se/php/modules/publications/reports/2006/XR-EE-EEK_2006_009.pdf">Reliability performance and maintenance – a survey of failures in wind power systems.

(You can read lots of energy KTH theses here: http://www.kth.se/ees/omskolan/organisation/avdelningar/etk/research/topics/2.15450/1.45428?l=en_UK)

Although I referenced Sweden in the title of this article, the study itself is not limited to that country, but also references the 5.1.3 Time span of data.

Here is one excerpt from the thesis:

5.1.3 Time span of data
Similar time spans have been used to make a comparison between the three different
countries. For the four different sources, only these time spans have been available for
statistical data:
• Sweden, published reports for the years 1997-2004
• Sweden, failure database with reports for the years 1989-2004
• Finland, published reports for the years 2000-2004
• Germany, published reports for the years 2003-2004

There are lots of tables and graphs in the thesis, and I have more or less taken the title of this post from Tables 3 and 4. If I had used Tables 14 and 15 instead in my title, then the title would be "Analysis of Modes of Failures for 3,175 Failure Events in Germany's 865 Wind Turbines 2004-2005."

By the way, the "624" and "865" are actually average numbers of wind turbines operating in a year. As delusional anti-nukes like to remind us, wind power is "growing fast" and the pyramid scheme is running so well that people insure one shitty wind turbine after another, not paying much attention to keeping the earlier ones going. Thus 865 is the average of 1080 German turbines that were in the database in 2004, and the 650 turbines in the database in 2005.

Here is a list of components that fail on these grease sticks in the sky:

Hubs, blades/pitch, generators, electrical systems, control systems, drive trains, sensors, gearboxes, mechanical brakes, hydraulics, yaw system, structure, and then a catch all, if the wind turbine blows up into little metal fragments: Total failure.

Different types of failure lead to different amounts of downtime. When the drivetrain fails, for instance, the average downtime for a crappy wind turbine is 291.2 hours or about 12 days if you can do math. Gearbox failures on average lead to 256.7 hours of downtime.

In Sweden, in the period between 2000 and 2004, the total downtime recorded in Swedish wind turbines was 156,202 turbine-hours or - if you aren't an anti-nuke and thus know something about math - 6,508 turbine-days.

Anyway, you can read the thesis yourself - it's linked. If you can't read, just look at the pictures, particularly the pie charts. By the way there are no pictures of flaming, crashed, bladeless wind turbines in the thesis.

So I'll just put some here:



(UK)



(US)



(US, fatal accident)



(Denmark.)

[kristopher]

1. 98% availability and you think this is a critical report? You didn't even get his name right...

The extreme conditions and the high loads that a wind turbine is exposed to makes the
coordination of maintenance an interesting issue. How much maintenance is needed? Are
there any ways of minimizing the maintenance and yet have a good availability for the wind
turbine? The technical availability of wind turbines is high, around 98%, but this is due to fast
and frequent service and not just because of good reliability or maintenance management.

...As a conclusion of this thesis work, it has been found that the gearbox is one of the most
critical components when it comes to which component that influences the downtime the
most. It is also shown that condition monitoring systems of today are able to supervise the
gearbox adequately. The theoretical implications of using condition based maintenance
together with condition monitoring systems shows great benefits and the overall conclusion is
that the use of CMS is beneficial when it comes to reducing the amount of failures of the
gearbox and also when it comes to scheduling the preventive maintenance.


Reliability performance and maintenance
- A survey of failures in wind power systems

Master Thesis
by Johan Ribrant
Master Thesis written at KTH School of Electrical Engineering, 2005/2006

[hughee99]

2. Germany is having such great success with Solar,

(at least according to Vt. State Sen. Peter Shumlan), they should forget the windmills.

http://www.abc22.com/Global/story.asp?S=12120387&nav=menu659_8_4

[Canuckistanian]

3. LOL

Thanks for the comic relief.

You're hilarious, love your stuff!

:thumbsup:

[joshcryer]

4. Page 33 is telling:

In the pre-study of this thesis it became evident that statistical data of failures was difficult to find. This was for several reasons, such as: no data was collected; the manufacturers of wind turbines refused to reveal data; the data are often not comparable due to different designs; some data are so expensive to access that it is simply not worth the effort, etc.

Excellent report. Thanks.

[Fledermaus]

5. The Water Bong Is So Smooth.....

The trailer park boys. A funny Canadian show.
VIDEO
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjbF-fZ5A5c