Turbine catches fire
Published Monday August 10th, 2009
Investigators will return to Kent Hills site today to determine cause
One of the 32 wind turbines operating at the Kent Hills wind farm caught fire over the weekend.
Elgin Fire Department and Employees of TransAlta, the power generation company that runs the farm, responded to the fire at about 9 a.m. Saturday and contained it.
Jason Edworthy, a spokesman for the Alberta-based company, said that three TransAlta employees who work on site were alerted by the turbine's sensor that there was a problem.
They went to the scene but saw no fire and returned to their office, only to receive another automated message, which prompted them to return to the turbine again.
Edworthy said a passer-by saw smoke and called the fire department
Officials haven't been able to confirm the cause of the fire yet.
Vestas, the company that supplies the turbines, will have a team on site today to try and determine what happened.
"Apparently, this is the first time this has ever happened on this particular model of turbine, so they're obviously quite concerned," said Edworthy.
Fire Departments from Riverview and Salisbury also responded to the call.
A single turbine is estimated to cost between $4 million and $5 million dollars.
The wind farm was commissioned in Dec. 31, 2008.
The turbine closest to the burned unit will be shut down as a precaution, but the rest of the farm will remain operating, Edworthy said.
No one was injured in the fire.
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http://www.wind-watch.org/news/2009/08/11/kent-hills-wind-farms-output-cut-by-turbine-fire/
Please correct me if I'm wrong.
It states that each turbine can generate 8.6 million kilowatts (8600 megawatts) per year, enough to power 540 homes.
There are 32 turbines.
Altogether should be good for 275,200 megawatts or 17,280 homes.
Further down in the article Energy TransAlta claims that 248 megawatts of the total 1200 megawatts in TransAlta's generation portfolio came from wind energy.
Enough for 15.5 homes.
It looks as if 2 industrial wind turbines are required to generate enough power for each home.
Obviously the wind industry's sales pitch has been extremely misleading. Actual production would seem to be over a 1000 times less than what they forecast.
Why are we letting this happen???
Kay Armstrong
- Electricity is an energy carrier (free flow of electrons)
- Electrical power can be turned into heat, light, or mechanical
motion.
- Power is the rate at which work is being done. Power is an
instantaneous measurement.
i.e. A 100 Watt light bulb, when on, is doing work at a rate of 100
Watts.
- Energy can be defined as the ability to do work (potential) and it
can be defined as the amount of work done over time.
i.e. A 100 Watt light bulb, when on for 1 hour, has used 100 Watt-Hours of Energy.
An average home uses about 40,000 Watt-hours (40kWh) per day or 14,600,000 Watt-Hours (14,600 kWh /14.6 MWh per year.
A large turbine is rated in mega-Watts or million Watt (1,000,000W).
A turbine’s rating is very misleading to the layperson, because it only states what the turbine will produce during optimal wind speeds. The wind speeds we usually get here in this province, would make all turbines produce only a small percentage of the “rated power output”.
Wind turbines have a capacity factor of between 20 – 40%. NB Power says they are operating at around 30% at Kent Hills.
The capacity factor of a wind turbine is the ratio of the actual output of the turbine over a period of time and its output if it had operated at full nameplate capacity the entire time.
More simply put: Capacity Factor is an indicator of how much energy a particular wind turbine makes in a particular place.
http://www.ceere.org/rerl/about_wind/RERL_Fact_Sheet_2a_Capacity_Factor.pdf
Here’s the math: (3MW or 3000kW turbine with a capacity factor of 30%)
(3000 kW) x (365 x 24 hours) x 30% = 7,884,000 kW-hr or 7884 MW-hr per year
Now this energy that comes from each turbine, is NOT what goes to each home. The energy has to travel through miles of cables, multiple transformers, and switching stations before it eventually reaches each home. All this travelling introduces losses know as inefficiencies and can be around 10% from turbine to home. (Only 90% of output is available to consumers).
Some more math: 7884 MW-hr per year x 90% = 7095.6 MW-hr per year
So how many homes can benefit from a single 3MW turbine in NB?
7095.6MWh / 14.6MWh = 486 homes (Approximate)