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2023-02-07 Science & Technology

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Posted by Deacon Blues 2023-02-07 00:00|| || Front Page|| [11127 views ] Top

#1 UK Once Again Brings Coal Power Plants Online as, Foreseeably, It Gets Cold in Winter

Posted by Skidmark 2023-02-07 06:56|| 2023-02-07 06:56|| Front Page Top

The Sunday Mail revealed via a whistleblower that diesel generators were used on 71 turbines in order to prevent them freezing during cold weather in December.

Posted by Besoeker 2023-02-07 07:09|| 2023-02-07 07:09|| Front Page Top

#3 Freezing, eh? No way to, um, winterize them, is there? That's some slick engineering for something that has to be outdoors its entire operational life.

Posted by M. Murcek 2023-02-07 07:16|| 2023-02-07 07:16|| Front Page Top

Freezing, eh? No way to, um, winterize them, is there? That's some slick engineering

Same comment applies to the measures shown to be useless during the recent Texas freezes. One would have thought at the minimum that Texas building managers would have understood that water pipes in unheated buildings tend to burst and damage the buildings, but apparently this wasn't the case in Texas.

Posted by Gromble Dribble4342 2023-02-07 08:31|| 2023-02-07 08:31|| Front Page Top

#5 I get (but disagree with) the urge to "save money" by ignoring winterization in a once-in-a-hundred-years scenario (though Texas seems to have gotten that two years in a row!) I don't think a company operating in Scotland can claim that excuse.

Posted by M. Murcek 2023-02-07 08:37|| 2023-02-07 08:37|| Front Page Top

#6 Large wind turbines require an incoming source of electricity from the grid to keep all their 'innards' operating properly (like phase/frequency synchronization, system controls...and heaters). This separate incoming source is normally not in the same power cabling overhead/underground scheme as the turbine outputs and often doesn't follow the same routing. Loss of this power source does require auxiliary power to keep the above big fans running, so I'm not really surprised by that.

Leaving the turbines running with bad convertors or sketchy hydraulic units is very bad, and can lead to further damage. There are abundant internal monitoring systems within these turbine towers that would alert the operators to these problems and failure to respond is just nuts, especially for the hydraulics.

Over here, the companies would immediately take those units completely offline (via remote control, hence the secondary source of electricity noted above) and shut them completely down until they're repaired. You've seen some turbines completely stopped while others are going full tilt, haven't you? That's usually what's happening.

Posted by Mullah Richard 2023-02-07 11:13|| 2023-02-07 11:13|| Front Page Top

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