Indian wind turbine maker Suzlon Energy’s shares gained 8 percent on Tuesday, after sources told Reuters that Suzlon’s founders are looking to raise up to $48 million through the sale of a 2 percent stake in the world’s fifth-largest wind turbine maker.
Shares in leading solar cell maker Q-Cells closed the day up 2.39 percent after it reported profits that missed market forecasts and CEO Anton Milner and CFO Hartmut Schüning tried to assuage investor fear over solar project funding.
Turns out birds aren’t the only ones with a reason to steer clear of wind farms.
This past weekend, a wind turbine spinning out of control forced California police to shut down a stretch of highway because of concerns that it could break into large, heavy, and very fast-moving pieces.
California Highway Patrol officers late on Sunday morning noticed that a roughly 125-foot tall turbine on a ridge near the desert town of Tehachapi was spinning much faster than any of the others at the Tehachapi farm.
“It looked like a propellor on an aircraft… and it was giving off a loud racket as it failed,” Officer Ed Smith said.
Officials contacted AES, the power company that owns the wind farm, and Smith said “it was determined that if it failed it could cast large pieces of steel and debris up to a mile from where the turbine was.”
Given that the state’s Highway 58 is less than half a mile from the location of the crazy turbine, which could not be stopped, officials resolved to shut down the road. It was closed for about 10 hours, Smith said, at which point the winds had died down enough to reopen it.
AES spokeswoman Meghan Dotter said the turbine was made in the mid-1980s by Denmark’s Vestas and was smaller than more modern models. The turbine’s brake failed, Dotter added, causing it to spin out of control in high winds of more 50 mph. The site is being monitored now, she said.
Turns out this sort of thing has happened before. In upstate New York, a General Electric-made turbine caught fire and collapsed in March after a wiring malfunction at Noble Environmental Power’s Altona Wind Park. No one was hurt, but debris from the turbine was flung a quarter of a mile away.
To see just how dramatic a wind turbine failure can be, check out the video of a separate incident below:
(Additional reporting by Bernie Woodall)
Photocredit: Reuters/Fred Prouser (A large wind turbine is pictured near Palmdale, California)
Halloween is just around the corner, and it may be better than most years for one of Earth’s most unpopular species: the bat.
Something sinister is happening to bats in the United States — not only are their numbers declining due to a mysterious malady, but large numbers of them are also being caught mid-flight in the spinning wind turbines that are cropping up rapidly across the nation.
The furry flying critters may get help this month thanks to an unlikely group of conservationists, wind energy companies and the U.S. government, who say they are undertaking a big effort to lower the number of bats killed by wind turbine blades.
The group, called the Bats and Wind Energy Cooperative, is studying whether stopping wind turbines during low wind conditions will reduce bat deaths at U.S. wind farms. It is also evaluating how much electricity is lost by the shutdowns.
The effort to curb bat fatalities at U.S. wind farms comes as wind power is expanding and North American bat populations are in decline due to a mysterious illness known as White-nose Syndrome.
Conservationists have long worried about the danger of birds colliding with wind turbines, though some studies have shown that the number of birds that die from hitting turbine blades is low compared with kills from vehicles or buildings. The bat study “represents a new area of investigation for the wind industry,” according to Andrew Linehan of Iberdrola Renewables, which offered its Casselman Wind Power Project site in Pennsylvania for the experiment.
According to the BWEC, bat fatalities occur mainly on nights when the wind is scarce and turbines are operating at low power. Scientists believe, therefore, that shutting down the turbines when there is little wind could significantly reduce bat deaths with only a modest reduction in power production.
The group also said that though bats are “often ignored and falsley besmirched,” they “are vital to the health of the environment” because they are pollinators and seed dispersers in addition to predators of agricultural pests.
