Costly Broken Wind Turbines Give College Whopping Negative 99.14% Return On Investment

With wind power not providing electricity for lights just keep the candles handy old school light provider , works every time.

Here is some more information on what happened overall. It fills in a few gaps that make sense of some of the things that have been said.
http://bit.ly/lakelandwts

The school has a number of other smaller WTs that they are continuing with.

The company that supplied and made the turbines is Bora Energy based in Wood Dale. The WTs were among their first and any parts problems would be because the US manufacturer can not supply them. Odds are the basic unit is made elsewhere (someone said Italy) but Bora advertise their products as US made.

The photo is a stock one of WTs (common practice). A much larger and rather beautiful version can be seen at http://bit.ly/xinjiangwts
It’s part of a wind farm near Kumul in Xinjiang in the far North West of China. (I flew over one in the same area in 2008 – I don’t know if it’s the same one).The Chinese have the largest WT capacity in the world and keep on installing them. Done properly and used properly WTs have their place and can be competitive against other power generation systems. Done wrong you get ALtimont Pass in SF or this school’s installation. How any US company can provide a product of this magnitude that is not warranteed for more than a 4 year lifetime and not have parts available is hard to know.

The school has good experience with Solar PV so far and their proposals to install more are based on their experiences to date.

Solar can work “well enough”- again, properly done. It has fewer uncertainties than wind.
THe school is in Mattoon – just down the pike, as it were, from Charleston. Here is the annual sun /weather situation in Charlestone.
http://bit.ly/gaismacharleston
The top line of the 4th chart in Kwh/m^2/day gives the average full sunshine hours (SSH) per day by month.
Just on 6 hours/day in June and 1.5 SSH / day in December.
Annual average is 3.8 hours per day of full sun equivalent over a year.
So an eg 1 kW solar array would give somewhat LESS than 3.8h x 365 days x 1 kW =897 kWh of energy in a year. Actual will be less due to soar angle change by hour and season, dirt, … .
Value of energy depends on local tariff. If its $0.25/unit then that’s 897 x $0.25 = $224/year. Actually less as above. So say $150-$200 pa.
1 kW of actual panels costs under $1000. After you install them and add an MPPT inverter and … that may be say $3000. That’s a payback without looking at interest of say $3000/200 = 15 years to $3000/$150 = 20 years.
But governments etc MAY pay a premium for fed in power – or may not. If you feed power into the grid near where its used you get less losses and a given transmission line that feeds that area and others has less overall losses. What is charged to who by who is outside the scope of this discussion – but what you get is what you usually use for calculations.
In some applications it may be possible to use solar energy far more efficiently than other sources. eg if the school ever heats a swimming pool, or heats the buildings, then use of DC directly for heating can be VERY low loss if done well.

The article above said – “The grant-funded photovoltaic systems have generated nearly $9,000 worth of electricity so far this year and are expected to generate a total of $50,000 to $60,000 worth in 2016, Bullock said.”
I calculate that as very close to realistic. IF the $9000 is For Jan-March inclusive then from the Gaisma chart, sum of average SSH’s for Jan-Mar = 7.74. Sum of SSFs for whole year = 49.6.$58,400.
And 49.6/7.64 x $9000= $54000.

Hmmm – at $0.25/unit that sounds as though they have 150 kW of panels !!!!

Looks … Wow . Fancy that
Looking here
http://bit.ly/lakelandpv
I count 342 panels E&OE.
If they are 250 W panels that’s 85 kW.
In the less likely but possible event they are 500W panels that’s 170 kW – which with angle adjust etc brings it to amazingly close agreement with my figures above.
Fancy that ! 🙂

“They are not a good teaching tool if they are not working.”

Dunno; seems like a great teaching tool for anyone paying attention with an open mind….

– Reminds me so much of the Minute-Man ICBM Missal Silos that I saw being built in North Dakota in the 1960’s when I lived in Minot. That was a hugh industry investment, putting $millions into holes in the ground. (where are THEY now?)

At least Wind Turbines are above the ground where you can see what you got for your $Millions….haha

Going from wind to solar – yeah, that’ll work! /sarc

Apparently they don’t learn from experience. I question whether the administration of this school is qualified to run the place, let alone make intelligent decisions regarding supplying power to the institution. They have already had a learning experience on alternative sources of energy and have found it to be an abject failure. Now they want to repeat is. Is that not one of the definitions of insanity?

Any words after “expected to” should be disregarded.

“Dem/lib/prog/commie/satanist [sorry for the redundacy]®” mythological thinking: the triumph of drug-induced fantasy over millenia of experience.

Going from wind to solar power is like going from the frying pan into the fire. Solar panels wear out, and the sun doesn’t always shine, even in favorable climates (which Illinois is not). Even at maximum output (quite rare), the solar panels will furnish only a fraction of rated power and will always require a fossil-fuel backup.

“While they have been an excellent teaching tool for students, they have only generated $8,500 in power in their lifetime,”

Excellent teaching tool for why socialism is evil. The program is sold on the mirage of good feelings and projections based more on hope than on reality. When the unicorns fail to materialize, the project consumes far more resources than are available. Should no more resources be found, the project must be trashed, to the almost-total loss of the original investment. Even when money can be created out of thin air, this exercise in “sustainable energy” is itself economically unsustainable.

In my own work with companies in this field, I have yet to find one that set aside any funds to decommission the turbines. Some day our lands will be littered with unusable wind power turbines and government will be called upon to pay for the massive cleanup. Those yearning to ride unicorns over golden rainbows will be searching somewhere else.

“They are not a good teaching tool if they are not working.”

To the contrary! They just are not teaching the lesson you originally envisioned, but a newer and truer variant.

“I think it was an extremely worthy experiment when they were installed…” says the president of the school after wasting over a million dollars of the taxpayers’ money. Now he wants to waste more on solar; no accountability for him! Are the American people suckers, or what?

In new construction we always ask for things such as multi-year performance guarantees, warranty periods, recommended spare parts lists, estimates of operating costs, and so on. Wonder what happened here, where it seems that the vendor was able to walk away from the project without any consequences?

Hey! Democrat donors get to make a bundle. Doesn’t that count for something?

@Ray, but these kinds of projects make them feel good about themselves, and I think we can all agree that is what is most important. Certainly more important that delivering steady, usable power in a cost-effective manner.

The broken, too expensive to fix power turbines are a perfect training tool – for the School of Economics.

The photo shows four turbines, I thought the college only bought 3. (Buy 3, get one free?)

I like the snow-capped mountains though. I’ll have to add Illinois to my list of of alpine states. 🙂

Dear Alan,
You mentioned second-lowest bid! You caused me to re-think:
Was there a bid letting? What is the chance this was an illegal no-bid contract?
(I would not automatically assume anything.)

Dear Dennis,
I have heard the LLC wind turbines were really bad from the very beginning, and this issue was not caused from poor maintenance. Keep a watchful eye on the turbines up there in Wisconsin. …the ones you see every 2 weeks. Watch and wait to see if they self destruct like the ones which burned down in Livingston County or perhaps break blades like the two turbines near my empty house in Vermilion County.

For now, I am still OK with solar since they have not harmed neighbors or have any been declared as human health hazard like Duke Energy wind turbines in Brown County Wisconsin. Those people abandoned their homes for the same reason we did: sleep deprivation. Kevon Martis is right. “Wind turbines should not be given trespass zoning.”
Best Regards,
Ted Hartke

Perfectly defines liberalism. Didn’t do it long enough, or big enough or, whatever. Solar next. If this crap worked, the private sector would have done it and be cashing the checks. The training element being ignored is the futility of allowing gubminnt to spend other peoples money on this stuff. LL needs to get back to it’s core function.

One of the lessons I learned some decades ago might have been useful here…

Buy from the vendor with the SECOND-LOWEST Bid!

The cheapest one will probably deliver junk and the most expensive is often more than you need, although often the quality and workmanship IS worth it.

This story is a classic purchasing department decision problem and failure, compounded by the fact that the University didn’t have enough ‘skin in the game.’

“Lake Land plans to replace the two failed turbines with a solar power system paid for by a government grant. ‘[T]he photovoltaic panels are expected to save the college between $50,000 and $60,000 this year,’ Allee told the DCNF.”

People have be be stupid to believe that, especially after, “School officials’ original estimates found the turbine would save it $44,000 in electricity annually, far more than the $8,500 they actually generated.”

I pass @ 60 wind turbines in wi every 2 weeks on my way up north and rarely is even 1 down. What if the school learned to maintain them and then taught that? Derp!

“They are not a good teaching tool if they are not working.” Actually – this is a perfect training tool. Your students learn the truth – wind turbines are economic black holes that don’t produce the electricity promised and are very costly to maintain. They are not an alternative to real electrical sources and offer zero net benefit to society. Xcel Energy found the same problems at their Grand Meadow and Nobles wind projects in Minnesota – costs more to maintain and produces less electricity than advertised. These projects are both GE 1.5or 1.6 MW turbines.

Solar is much better. In this part of the country they will pay for themselves in 40 years and from then on it’s all free power. (Wait, what if they wear out in 25 years? Then what do we do?)

The unforunate thing about all this is the public keeps footing the bill. The government keeps funding production tax credits. Wind projects do nothing – the cost benefit ratio is a joke.

in fairness, if you interview the guy at lake land in charge of the wind turbines he’ll tell you that they got the *worst* possible brand. they used a company that has no other wind turbines in the world except these, they used a company in italy so parts have to come through customs every time they’re ordered which is such a waste of time, and the company itself seems to be a baby in the wind turbine industry and has trouble with troubleshooting their own machines. maybe if lake land had made a genuine investment in wind turbines with a reliable company instead of the cheapest, this wouldn’t be such an enormous flop. talk to joseph tillman, he’ll give you the real story here.

Wind power is a joke!!! To costly to maintain/repair…GO SOLAR!!!