Four down and many more to go - wind turbines
From the
UK Telegraph:
Wind farm being torn down for scrap
The four wind turbines, measuring 45 metres high, were put up in the 1990s but haven�t worked for years.
Campaigners said the turbines �turned the area into an industrial graveyard� as they celebrated news of the removal of the rusty machines, which will be used as scrap metal.
Locals said they had blighted the landscape and hadn�t worked for three quarters of the time they had been at the site in the Yorkshire Dales.
Peter Rigby, who helped set up the Parishoners Against the Chelker Turbines, said: "It's been a hell of a fight but we have proved it is possible to stop wind farms.
�In recent years the turbines have hardly ever worked - they have turned the area into an industrial graveyard and look like rotting tooth stumps.�
Good news -- there was a nice condition in the contract:
Ian Swain, development control officer at Craven District Council, said one of the conditions of the turbines being granted planning permission in the 1990s was that they would be removed if they stopped working.
He said: �The council was looking to enforce that requirement of the conditions because the turbines had been unused for a period of time. We understand that the level of maintenance required had become so great that they had become unviable.�
Wish this was enforced in the USA -- there are lots of dead windmills around here.
Windmills only work when the wind is blowing at a very specific range of speeds. They are programmed to shut down if the wind is too slow or too fast. The utility needs a source of backup power that can respond to these changes when they happen and the only kind of generator that can respond that quickly is a gas turbine running on hot standby -- it is actually running even when the wind turbine is contributing power, only not as fast and it is not consuming as much fuel.
The turbines themselves
require a large amount of electricity even when they are not being run -- windpower's dirty little secret...
Posted by DaveH at October 20, 2013 12:09 PM