Wind farm woes continue as Victorian turbines fail after only five years

By TONY MOBILIFONITIS

FIVE years down the track and Victoria’s Mt Gellibrand wind farm turbines, installed in 2018 at a cost of $258 million, are already wearing out. Wind turbines are supposed to last 25 years.

According to reports posted on social media, crews with 240-tonne cranes have been working at the wind farm dismantling turbines. According to one report posted on Facebook by a Victorian resident of Colac, 25km west of the site, a local scrap metal site showed him worn-out bearings pulled out of the hydraulic cylinders. They apparently cost $40,000. Turbine gearboxes had also broken down. “The cranes have been busy at Mt Gellibarnd here and at 240 tonnes apiece they cost a packet to keep going,” he said.

Another poster commented: “A dirty little secret regarding renewable energy has come to light. The generator motor on wind turbines need overhauling every five or six years. This requires huge cranes and semi trailers to bring a replacement generator and take the old one away. And the same deal with replacement blades.”

Breakdowns have also been spotted at the older Cape Bridgewater wind farm with blades broken off and many others not working, according to one eyewitness. The wind farm, completed in 2008, is supposed to produce 58MW from 29 wind generators. And in case you hadn’t heard kids, the operations at Cape Bridgewater abate an estimated 195,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions each year which apparently makes this pathetic little part-time power generator all worthwhile.

The question for the politicians like Chris Bowen and Dan Andrews (who as Victorian Premier touted this so-called new-era “clean energy” installation back in 2018) is who pays for this horrendously expensive “maintenance” on wind farms that fall apart? The electricity consumers?

The Mt Gellibrand wind farm supplies a part-time 132MW, better than Cape Bridgewater but just 1/16th of the 2200MW produced 24/7 by the so-called “dirty” Loy Yang A coal-fired power station that is supposed to be shut down in 2035. But it might well be kept open longer when politicians and bureaucrats and corporate kiddies wake up to the reality that you can’t run a state or even a major city like Melbourne on wind and solar farms.

Further questions must also be asked about how many more of these wind turbines will be up for replacement across Australia in the next five years. Mt Gellibrand wind farm is owned by Acciona, the Spanish energy company, which is also building the Macintyre wind project in Queensland.

Last August shares in Siemens Energy fell 37% when “quality problems” at Siemens Gamesa’s two most recent onshore wind turbine platforms came to light, with rotor blades and main bearings failing.

The cost of fixing these issues is 1.6 billion euros, later amended to 2.2 bil, with most of these costs expected to occur in the fiscal years 2024 and 2025. Siemens says these problems could affect up to 30% of the more than 132GW it has installed worldwide.

Siemens Energy declined to comment to Reuters on its supplier structure for bearings and turbines, but said suppliers were part of the review and that it was in talks over potential compensation payments.

Siemen’s problems are not unique and reports have emerged that wind farms are rapidly losing corporate backing in the US and elsewhere – all this happening while Australia’s Labor Party led state and federal governments are furiously pushing them.

According to The Impossible Build, a website that monitors global mega-projects, wind farms in the US generate 12.4% of the country’s energy consumption, up massively in the past 14 years. But now the corporate sector is opting out of projects which have since last year have been put on hold or cancelled.

The website claimed June and July last year were catastrophic for wind power projects with “almost all the big players in the sector halting or pulling out” of the entire wind energy business in the US. These included Shell, BP, Orsted of Denmark, Equinor of Norway, Iberdrola of Spain, EDP of Portugal, Engie and EDF of France.

Wikipedia currently lists 39 wind farm projects in NSW, but five of those are listed as cancelled, one decommissioned, one under construction, eight at feasibility study stage and four planning approved, leaving just 20 with a total maximum capacity of 1984MW when the wind is blowing at the right speed across the entire state.

Of the 16 wind farm projects listed for Queensland, two are reported as cancelled, five at feasibility stage, five with planning approval, two proposed and only one, MacIntyre west of Warwick (Australia’s biggest) now commissioned.

Last year a 60 Minutes program featured a family living near the Toora wind farm in South Gippsland saying they are tortured by the constant hum and low-pitch vibrations from the blades and turbines. There an angry public meeting between its supporters and opponents, who included British scientist Dr David Bellamy, ostracised by the establishment over his rejection of the climate change narrative.

What was most significant however, was the revelation by 60 Minutes that the 2000 wind turbines already installed on thousands of hectares of land and ocean across the UK only supply less than 1 per cent of the nation’s power, which again illustrates the ridiculously low power density of this form of electricity generation.

60 Minutes reporter Charles Wooley went on to parrot the very climate change narrative rejected by Bellamy, and interviewed one of its main proponents Professor James Lovelock, who, like Greta Thunberg, thinks the planet is careering towards overheating and a climate apocalypse.

But the professor was not sufficiently delusional to see wind farms as a solution. “At the best wind farms can not provide more than a tiny fraction of the energy needs of civilization,” he said. And the professor is correct.

Wind farms require a massive amount of land and sea area, with major infrastructure required to service them. Acciona, the builders of the Macintyre Wind Farm west of Warwick, say the 180 wind turbines will require 220km of service road. Each tower has a massive concrete base dug into the trap rock landscape.

The wind farm will cover 35,000 hectares or an area 25 km long by 15km wide with a part-time “capacity of 1 gigawatt (1000 megawatts), about a third of the on-demand generating capacity of Eraring Power Station near Newcastle, the same power station that its idiotic corporate owners Origin Energy and the Albanese government are in a hurry to shut down.

Eraring, Australia’s biggest coal-fired power station, is regularly described as “loss making”, as are the LaTrobe Valley power stations. They are loss-making firstly because their supply economics are disrupted by wind and solar and secondly because maintenance has been scaled down due to the insane policy to shut them all down in the near future.

The reality is that Macintyre Wind Farm, will sometimes supply up to a third of the electricity supplied by Eraring, given the right conditions. At 9.15am on April 9, 60% of the NSW electricity supply was being supplied by the state’s four black coal-burning power stations, primarily Eraring (2880MW) and Bayswater (2640MW), along with Mount Piper (1400MW) and Vales Point B (1320MW) for a total 8240MW.

Four gas turbine stations across the state produce a combined output of 1914MW, which is used primarily to back up the intermittent wind and solar, due to the ability of gas to fire up and begin generation almost instantly, unlike coal. There is also a list of 15 small power stations powered by natural gas, landfill gas, bio gas, sewage gas, coal methane producing a mere 156MW.

The growing list of 17 NSW and ACT solar farms produce a total combined maximum capacity of 846MW of electricity on days when the sun is shining across all of NSW. Six co-generation plants produce only 77.5MW and another six biomass plants 98.5MW.

Add to that 25 hydro-electric schemes with a capacity of 6081MW, which sounds impressive until you realise, again, that this renewable source is highly sporadic and can be severely diminished in droughts. Also, much of that capacity is used to pump water back into the dams to maintain levels for further generation.

Wikipedia shows NSW with 39 wind farm projects, but five of those are listed as cancelled, one decommissioned, one under construction, 8 at feasibility study stage and four planning approved, leaving 20 with a total maximum capacity of 1984MW when the wind is blowing at the right speed across the entire state.

All these dispersed renewable energy sources are connected by thousands of kilometres of additional power lines criss-crossing the state, contributing multiple billions of dollars in extra costs to produce retail electricity.

NSW has decommissioned a dozen power stations producing 6160MW. These, combined with the remaining four, once provided almost continuous and inexpensive 24×7 electricity to the state.

Overseas in Ontario, Canada, farmers are regretting the day they signed up with wind farm operators back in the early 2000s. What they didn’t bargain on was their groundwater supplies being muddied up by pile-driving for the massive wind tower bases and the ongoing effects of blade vibrations. Incredibly, some claim that the vibrations cause deformities in the feet of livestock.

Bill Clarke, an independent hydrogeological consultant who ran Waterloo Geoscience Consultants Ltd, says he is opposed to those developments that may cause serious and possibly irreparable damage to the environment.

“It is obvious to me that the main aquifer under the Chatham-Kent area of southern Ontario is being affected by the construction and operation of wind turbine towers. These problems are being exacerbated as a result of developers not responding to catastrophic issues for many private wells in the immediate area.

“Simply stated, wind towers, for generating electrical power, should never have been constructed over the extremely fragile contact aquifer of the Kettle Point shale,” he recently wrote.

Rural landowners in the Dover area were approached in the early 2000s, and some agreed to have towers erected on their land. Wind tower construction was initiated in 2007 in the Marsh Line Wind farm, as stage one of a series of stages.

“Within a week of pile driving, one resident observed heavily turbid water. Within months of operation, many wells in the Dover area were pumping ground water that was highly turbid, expressing itself as everything from cloudy water to totally plugging up the pressure tanks.

“The number of affected wells is unknown since the agreements to place towers on private land also included gag orders that prevented the residents from reporting any detrimental affects on the quality of the well water.

“It was impossible to compare pre-construction conditions to post-construction conditions because there was no meaningful data collected to characterize the ground water quality or quantity from a single well in the Dover area.