The name should conjure up almost as much excitement as a board slamming hockey game, though. You can bet your puck it does on a lovely province of Canada named “Prince Edward Island.” Located way the froock fruck up north, it’s tucked in off the northern coasts of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and is one of the fabled Canadian “maritime provinces.”
Nicknamed “PEI,” the island’s tourism arm describes it thusly:
A breathtaking destination, filled with wandering trails, endless beaches, and unique experiences everywhere you look.
They’re even encouraging webpage visitors to “Warm up to Winter” right now with some pretty inviting pictures of seasonal activities. But at an average snowfall of 114 in. with lows running from 11-26°F, plus wind chills often dropping that to a real feel of -13°F or so, bundling up would be the prudent word of the day if you were venturing out.
Speaking of the wind, the Canadian government – in their typically understated fashion – also notes that, while the climate is “mild” because of proximity to the Gulf, the breeze can be brisk on PEI.
Prince Edward Island has a mild climate thanks to the warm waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Being surrounded by water also means that there is usually a breeze and at times can get quite windy.
Which is why, in 2012, the PEI government signed a $60M contract with a Spanish company (ACCIONA Windpower) for a 10 turbine wind farm. Where better than where the breeze always blows, right?
The Hermanville towers and turbines were up and spinning by 2014, with an anticipated life-span of at least 20 years, and a darn near constant source of power generation for the local community. A local community that, by the by, was pretty opposed to the project to begin with. So functioning as promised was particularly important as the wind farm also needed to generate profits to pay the province back for its initial investment and prove the naysayers wrong.
Promises, promises, pinkie swear!
$60M wind farm will lower power price: energy minister
Prince Edward Island’s Energy Minister Wes Sheridan promises the Hermanville wind farm, which is rapidly coming to completion, will bring down the price for power customers on the Island.
Sheridan said the $60-million investment is good for P.E.I.
“The price we get this electricity at is significantly below what we pay for our provider, in this case it’s New Brunswick for the rest of our power, so this brings our price down per kilowatts for all customers on P.E.I.”
The turbines should be fully operational within a week.
The ten wind turbines are the largest in North America. While they are owned by the province through the PEI Energy Corporation, they will be operated for the next 15 years through an agreement with Acciona Windpower, the company that manufactured them.
‘S all good.
Welp
20 years was a bit too optimistic as far as a lifetime of service it seems. Too ambitious for even the 15 year service contract (called “Nordex” after ACCIONA merged with a German company). In only two years of operation, cracks were starting to appear that had to be repaired, so whoops – that’s a production hit.
Maintenance work has decreased production at the wind farm in Hermanville, P.E.I.
Heather MacLeod, manager of energy assets for Prince Edward Island Energy Corporation, said small cracks were found in five blade bearings.
…”So we have ten turbines at the Hermanville wind farm. Each turbine has three blade bearings for each of the three blades. So in total, there are 30 blade bearings,” said MacLeod.
And this is kind of funny in hindsight.
…She added there are 96 big bolts holding a turbine on. Cracks would be in just one or two of these bolts, so there was never any concern about blades coming off.
Especially since province officials had arranged a special kind of victory tour for skeptical locals, showing off their modern Green marvel a mere two months before that shutdown.
…The province wants the public to see how much power the $60-million, 10-turbine Clearspring Wind Project in eastern P.E.I. is generating and to put to rest any doubts about it.
Timing. It’s everything.
The turbines couldn’t even make it through 2022 without significant or downright inoperable hiccups. The operation is barely 8 years old at this point.
And then, as of only this past May, it started to get awful quiet out on the farm.
More than half of Hermanville wind turbines sitting idle
Just four of 10 turbines at the Hermanville Wind Farm are currently running and one has failed completely.
A statement from PEI Energy, Environment and Climate Change did not clarify how long the issues have been affecting energy output or how much productivity has been lost at the north side facility. However, “Some turbines are paused and some are at reduced capacity,” the statement reads. “The newest fleet of Acciona 116/300 turbines are proving to require the largest amount of maintenance. A significant issue is the main bearings.”
Several sources have verified that for most of the past eight months only three or four turbines have been active at the same time.
For fiscal year 2021-2022 there were over half a million dollars in lost revenue due to lost productivity.
By July of this year, they had 6 turbines down for the count, and all those promised savings on energy prices had vanished long ago.
…The P.E.I. Energy Corporation said energy production at the Hermanville wind farm for 2022-23 was about 40,000 megawatt hours — just 35 per cent of the 110,000 megawatt hours the farm produced in each of its first two years of operation.
Trying to get the broken turbines fixed, the provincial administration was running into the crappy attitudes of wind companies themselves, and the economic realities plus self-inflicted wounds buffeting the wind industry at large.
…The corporation said the non-working turbines had been offline for between 114 and 476 days.
“I think it’s bearings that are broken, and we’ve had trouble with the supplier to meet our needs,” said Myers.
“They don’t seem to have a whole lot of interest in standing behind their product.”
There’s not going to be any invitations accepted from residents to conciliatory farm tours. As of this past September, they were already snorting fire…
An Eastern Kings group is calling for an inquiry into costly breakdowns of the Hermanville wind farm, which have left six of 10 wind turbines idle.
“It operates at 31 per cent production. Sixty-five per cent production is needed in order for the project to become green. That’s because the carbon footprint to produce, transport and install these windmills is so huge.”MacPhee said that, with the additional $10 million cost of repairs, taxpayers were on the hook for a $70-million loss.
Cudmore added that the $4.8 million received from the company represents “all liquidated damages payments owing to P.E.I. Energy Corporation.”During the committee meeting, the EKCA also called for a repeal of regulations made to the Renewable Energy Act, which allows the province to fully permit wind farm projects regardless of opinions of municipalities. It also called for another investigation into what it described as a conflict of interest of P.E.I.
…and managed to kill another proposed farm in the court system that the local PEI provincial government had, again, rolled over resident objections to approve.
If they were that mad months ago, I can’t imagine how pissed off they are NOW.
Vicious winds tear 2 blades off wind turbine in Hermanville, P.E.I.: One of the wind turbines in Hermanville, P.E.I., had two of its blades completely torn off as powerful winds raged across the province this week. The tower of the turbine known as Tower… https://t.co/TC2RqI9o8p pic.twitter.com/zvUgumAz9r
— Alabama Wind (@alabamawind) January 4, 2024
Each of those blades is 56m or over 183 ft long. Can you imagine that flying through the air?
HOLY SWIRLING NINJA SWORDS
One of the wind turbines in Hermanville, P.E.I., had two of its blades completely torn off as powerful winds raged across the province this week.
The tower of the turbine known as Tower 9 is also damaged, and staff with the Department of Environment, Energy and Climate Action are investigating.
…Environment Canada put Prince Edward Island under wind warnings twice this week. A gust of 93 km/h was recorded Thursday at East Point, a short distance from the wind farm.
Because the turbine wasn’t operating, the blades were stationary and couldn’t move with the wind, so they were completely ripped off.
The staff says they’re “confident insurance” will cover it. But there’s a whole ‘nuther bag of worms there. Because it turns out not only are the authorities having problems getting the service contractor Nordex to fix anything, they also are supposed to be compensated to lost revenue when production stops because of issues with equipment.
But in their infinite genius, PEI officials had also signed a contract that with limits on how much compensation Nordex had to pay.
…Nordex is under contract to maintain the turbines until 2029, and that contract includes a stipulation that the company pay P.E.I. when production from the turbines drops.
But there are caps on those payments, which have almost been reached.
But wait – there’s more, and sure to absolutely incense PEI residents across the face of the island. It turns out that there had been an engineer’s report done in 2022 – a year and a half ago – that basically said the Hermanville turbines were TOAST.
P.E.I. wind turbines at ‘high risk of imminent failure,’ consultant warned province in 2022
A consultant hired in 2022 to assess production problems at a wind farm owned by the P.E.I. government found severe damage, with turbine units possibly constituting a safety hazard and turbine blades at “high risk of imminent failure.”
They were still running the wind farm anyway.
…Electricity generation had fallen to 10 per cent of design capacity by July 2023, with only four of 10 turbines operational and some of those running at reduced capacity because officials were concerned about damage.
Remember the energy assets manager and her breezy, “there was never any concern about blades coming off“?
This time there was, and they were spinning anyway – for over a year after learning about the danger. It’s kind of like the scene where the Sheriff Brody gets called out because he didn’t tell anyone there’d been a shark attack off the Amity Island beach.
This could have been catastrophic. Catastrophic.
Lord.
What lengths they won’t go to and what believers won’t do when they sell their souls to the Green gods…