Mary Wilson
Well-known member
Feb 16, 2021,11:05pm EST
Scott Carpenter
The failure of roughly half of the wind turbines in Texas earlier this week isn’t the biggest cause of a power shortage crisis that has left one-third of Texans without power in historic freezing conditions.
Frozen infrastructure at gas and coal power stations, such as pipelines, are the main culprit. Of the total amount of power that suffered outages, wind accounted for only some 13%, a far smaller share than accounted for by coal, gas and nuclear plants.
Still, wind power is a major resource in Texas: it supplied 23% of the state’s electricity in 2020, second only to the 40% share by natural gas, and had been producing a larger share than normal before the widespread outages.
... So it’s fair to ask: why don’t wind turbines fail all the time in colder climates, such as Canada, Sweden or the American Midwest?
The answer, in short, is that turbines in colder places are typically equipped with de-icing and other tools, such as built-in heating. In Texas, where the weather is almost never this cold, they usually are not.
“Cold weather kits can keep [wind turbines] operating when temperatures plunge. This is the norm in colder states and in Europe,” said Samuel Brock, a spokesman for the American Clean Power Association. “Historically in Texas, given the warm climate, it hasn’t been necessary.”
... In Canada, where wind turbines can experience icing up to 20% of the time in winter months, special “cold weather packages” are installed to provide heating to turbine components such as the gearbox, yaw and pitch motors and battery, according to the Canadian government. This can allow them to operate in temperatures down to minus 22 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 30 Celsius).
https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottc...ze-de-icing-and-carbon-fiber/?sh=443b03b31f59
Scott Carpenter
The failure of roughly half of the wind turbines in Texas earlier this week isn’t the biggest cause of a power shortage crisis that has left one-third of Texans without power in historic freezing conditions.
Frozen infrastructure at gas and coal power stations, such as pipelines, are the main culprit. Of the total amount of power that suffered outages, wind accounted for only some 13%, a far smaller share than accounted for by coal, gas and nuclear plants.
Still, wind power is a major resource in Texas: it supplied 23% of the state’s electricity in 2020, second only to the 40% share by natural gas, and had been producing a larger share than normal before the widespread outages.
... So it’s fair to ask: why don’t wind turbines fail all the time in colder climates, such as Canada, Sweden or the American Midwest?
The answer, in short, is that turbines in colder places are typically equipped with de-icing and other tools, such as built-in heating. In Texas, where the weather is almost never this cold, they usually are not.
“Cold weather kits can keep [wind turbines] operating when temperatures plunge. This is the norm in colder states and in Europe,” said Samuel Brock, a spokesman for the American Clean Power Association. “Historically in Texas, given the warm climate, it hasn’t been necessary.”
... In Canada, where wind turbines can experience icing up to 20% of the time in winter months, special “cold weather packages” are installed to provide heating to turbine components such as the gearbox, yaw and pitch motors and battery, according to the Canadian government. This can allow them to operate in temperatures down to minus 22 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 30 Celsius).
https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottc...ze-de-icing-and-carbon-fiber/?sh=443b03b31f59