Perceptive readers will have noticed the little red graph on the right plunge to zero after the big wind we had on 9th January. This was due to my AWP windmill plunging to the ground with a broken alternator shaft. Yesterday I was pleased to get it back in action.
This would have happened a lot sooner if I had not had a lot of neighbours’ windmills to fix as well. Out of 35 windmills up and running on the night of the storm, roughly 25% failed, many of them pretty catastrophically. It’s almost exactly ten years since the last big wind like this which had a similar effect.
Most of the wind turbines ran through the night unscathed. Some had the short circuit brake on. It’s interesting that the failure rate of the braked turbines was slightly higher than the failure rate of those that were left running. Failure rate of commercially manufactured turbines (Ampair, Proven) was similar to or higher than local manufactured ones.
Have you ever lowered turbines in anticipation of a very destructive storm?
personally no I never have, but I do have a neighbour who does this habitually since his machine got destroyed quite regularly by extreme turbulence in a particular wind direction. So now he knows to take it down when there is a bad forecast from that particular sector but on the whole there is no reason to do this.
If you start to think like that then you waste a lot of effort and miss a lot of potential production and become a slave to your machine instead of it being a slave to you.
Hugh