http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/articles/2016/06/quiet-revolution-vawt-total-flop-says-german-paper.html
[Unfortunately, enthusiasm is a poor substitute for good planning,
judgment and execution. Such examples then reflect on the rest of the
RE community, and the conventional energy industry loves to play up
these examples and have the budgets to keep them in the forefront of the
MSM message stream.
links in on-line artice]
Quiet Revolution VAWT Total Flop, Says German Paper
June 14, 2016
By Paul Gipe
The Rheinischen Post reported that the installation of a small
Vertical-Axis Wind Turbine (VAWT) was a total flop and removed.
The Quiet Revolution 5 VAWT was installed in 2012 and in the 3.5 years
the turbine was in “operation” the school encountered many problems with
the Darrieus turbine. This from a summary by Patrick Jüttemann on the
German web portal for small wind turbines titled Vertikale
Windkraftanlage wird wieder abgebaut – Aus Fehlern lernen.
The turbine was installed atop a school in Rommerskirchen, a village
northwest from Cologne. The original article in the Post said that most
of the time the turbine, what it called a “mixer” for its similarity to
an eggbeater, stood still and didn’t produce any electricity.
Jüttemann suggests that the failure of the project was due to poor
project planning and could provide lessons that others could learn from.
Indeed that’s true, but how many lessons of poor project planning do we
need before we learn anything new? We knew beforehand that the QR 5 was
unlikely to perform well even when sited to best advantage. We knew that
putting the turbine on top of a school in the middle of city was a very
poor idea. We knew that without competent management and service the
project would fail. We knew that RWE, the regional utility that
installed the turbine, had invested in Quit Revolution—in Great
Britain—when the company overtly opposed wind energy in its own country.
We knew that RWE was greenwashing. We knew that an investment by a
utility like RWE in a wind company was the kiss of death. And indeed it
was. The company has been defunct for several years now. How many times
do we have to do this before we learn these very basic lessons?
What we can learn from this is that we don’t need any more
“experiments.” We’ve been there, done that—two or more decades ago. That
contemporary marketers (hustlers?), engineers, and small wind advocates
should examine their motives and their understanding of the history of
wind energy and why we put wind turbines where we put them.
We should be especially leery when a utility comes to our community and
says “We’re here to help you develop renewable energy.”
That this turbine was doomed to fail—and would give small wind
another—and unneeded—black eye was obvious from the beginning—for anyone
who had the desire to know.
More on why VAWTs have been tried—again and again—and failed every time
can be found in Chapter 6 of Wind Energy for the Rest of Us.
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