Minnesota’s frozen turbines raise new doubts about wind power | Hacker News Reader

Minnesota’s frozen turbines raise new doubts about wind power

green.venturebeat.com

14 pointstransburgh20 comments

Wow, this is a really misleading article. It takes a minor problem caused by a technical mistake, and turns it into something that threatens the viability of wind power as we know it.

There are known hydraulic fluids that operate fine in Minnesota temperatures. There are wind turbines that currently operate without problems in places colder than Minn.

The only problem is that these particular turbines were designed for the California climate and then someone bought them used and moved them to Minnesota without doing a proper feasibility study.

This is at most a story about local corporate and/or government incompetence. It has nothing to do with the future of wind power.

Totally agree. Funny that, in order to diagnose this problem, they probably drove out to the turbines in a vehicle with hydraulic brakes. Judging from the tone of this article, that accomplishment constitutes a major scientific discovery.

"Site's HTTP 503 error raises new doubts about Internet"

It's so frustrating that anytime we talk about any new idea the same old battles have to be rehashed with a lack of perspective on the current status quo having its own set of problems. I'm pretty sure we can figure out how to make a turbine that works and harness solar & wind power efficiently and reliability. I have doubts we can convince OPEC nations to keep selling us cheap oil as their production peaks and declines in the near future. I have doubts that the existing energy cartels will ever invest serious time and resources into making carbon energy cleaner. I have serious long term doubts that we can continue to extract carbon energy sources from the Earth in the required quantities to provide energy for 6 billion+ people. I'm almost sure we can't do it in an environmentally friendly way. Doubts? Yeah lots.

This is a tiny technical issue and isn't worth reading about. Long story short -- they need to paint the turbine black or use a tiny bit of energy to heat the fluid.

Wouldn't switching the hydraulic fluid be sufficient? It's not like there's one single hydraulic fluid in existence, there's thousands of natural and artificial fluids that can be used in hydraulics.

The hydraulic fluid was obviously chosen for California weather not Minnesota, so the hydraulic fluid could suitably be changed for operating in lower temperature ranges.

We have lots of wind turbines up here in Canada, and they spin year round. I don't think it's a fatal problem with turbines in general, just with the used ones they tried to transplant from California.

Agreed, P.E.I. has countless wind turbines and I've never heard a problem. They're on an island unprotected from the brunt force of the Atlantic all year round, if this was a common problem then P.E.I. wouldn't be covered with turbines.

The writer certainly didn't show any effort to demonstrate non-viability of fixes, and he also didn't provide any information on performance of newer turbines or those from other vendors.

This was a case of 20 year old units being purchased used and moved to a much harsher environment. I would not be surprised if the people involved didn't even check to see what operating temperature range was specified by the manufacturer.

I don't think anyone has claimed that wind power is practical everywhere. Sites must be studied in adequate detail, and in some cases a test installation is appropriate ahead of wide-scale deployment.

There seem to be far too many writers and anal-ists giving opinions where they're not qualified to.

"As new sources of renewable energy are developed like thin film and solar thermal, for example more and more doubts about wind are coming to the fore."

So technology doesn't stand still. Passive voice is a sure-fire red flag. Who is raising these alleged doubts. Where are the numbers comparing the other technologies to Wind. Why are a few 20-year old turbines that some one forgot to change the hydraulic fluid relevant to the current tech level in Wind power?

As Heinlein said, "What are the facts, and to how many decimal places?"

Yeah, one turbine is mis-designed, so wind power is a failure. Some other things that had bugs in their first revision: <list of everything you use on a daily basis>.

Yeah, but one dude who was doing climate change research fudged his numbers! That means this wind turbine was set up to fail from the beginning and it's very existence is part of a conspiracy to dupe people into spending .00001% of the federal budget on alternative energy!

Exactly. If wind power catches on, the terrorists will have won... or something...

tl;dr: it gets cold in Minnesota in the winter, and you need different gear oil in your equipment.

At mines in the upper midwest, the diesel fuel used in (expensive, famous-name) heavy equipment wouldn't flow when its temperature got far below zero. At that time, they had to let the engines idle all night because they had no other (engineered) way to keep the fuel warm.

Yet there are obvious solutions to problems like these. So it's not a "windmill fail" like this newbie journalist is painting it. That they often put out less than their "peak" power is a self-evident part of windpower, and matters nothing so long as the plant is cost-effective. Unlike nuclear.

http://www.greenharbor.org/2010/01/wind-turbines-installed-a...

Uh, something doesn't seem right here...

Every growth industry has it's ups and downs. You find out what works and what doesn't, fix what doesn't, and keep on going. Shouldn't be a big deal.

Haha, I live right near this wind turbine. It has literally not spun once the entire time it has been installed. I'd love to know how much it cost the taxpayers of the city that it's in.

Probably no more than any other research project.

"Out of sight, out of mind" at its best, but the opposite.

It seems like the real question this article completely misses is who had the bright idea to buy 20 year old turbines and install them without any kind of engineering assessment?

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