Understanding Turbine Failure
It's fairly obvious that wind turbine failure has to be about the worst thing that can happen to any project owner: it's expensive to fix, reduces production time and creates even more uncertainty about wind's viability as a resource.
The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), in its spring journal, examines the issue and highlights its efforts to find preventive solutions. That caught my eye, so I spoke to one of the authors and another EPRI manager.
One thing EPRI is doing is looking to other power systems, with decades of experience, to determine what might work for wind.
"One thing we would like to do with our expertise is to leverage the knowledge of our nuclear and fossil-fuel base into the research of the operations of wind turbines," said Stan Rosinski, EPRI's program manager for renewable energy generation.
He specifically mentioned condition monitoring as one promising area of research as some components have a high incidence of failure. And that's problem with parts failure: there are just so many of them.
The collaborative effort of EPRI, with industry partners taking an active role in funding and research, will last more than a year. The work builds on the previous work of the U.S. Department of Energy and Danish industry equipment certifier Det Norsk Veritas, said Charles McGowin, senior program manager for wind at EPRI and a co-author of the journal article.
That work, completed in 2004, established time frames for the expected failures of some components. But there is newer and better technology, and there are now thousands of new units in the field that have been erected as wind energy has expanded as a resource.
"This will provide more detailed data," McGowin said. "And this will be important to the owners as they develop their maintenance schedules over the life of the turbine."
Turbines are projected to have a 20-year lifespan, though some components might fail in the first five or six years. And with some of the smaller "antiques" from the 1980s still functioning in California, it's something worth doing, multiplied by a few thousand times.
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