Gearboxes removed from 3-year-old wind turbines

Credit: Freedy Freeman ~~

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Here’s what’s being removed from the duds from the western part of Alliant Energy’s Whispering Willow North windpower facility in Franklin County, Iowa.

They have been dropping the blades on one unit after another for the past 2 years.

There are 15 units that just sit idle most of the time, and another 10 that are getting serviced.

These gearboxes are being removed from the units and dropped by the uplink 350-KV substation.

We happened to pull up just as the 50 ton crane and service trucks were driving away from dropping off 2 of them.

This expansion of Whispering Willow East was installed in 2019 and turned on in late 2020. The units starting dying within one year.

In August 2021 we had a derecho with 120-knot winds at the surface in August. You can imagine the strain up at 350 to 700 feet up on those units.

In December 2022, we had a macro blow with 3 days of −13 °F temps with constant gale winds at 50 to 70 mph non stop to December 25th.

That is above the range for these units to produce output.

There has been constant maintenance on these 81 2.5-MW units since those times.

The big winners are the service contractors crawling into them and the 500-foot crane that moves from one to another dropping the blades and putting them back up.

The big losers are the people here in the prairies that have had their Alliant electric bills increased 12 times in the past decade to over 120%.

Note the tags on the gearboxes:

China Transmission Holdings Limited
Oil quantity: ~440 liters (116 US gallons)
Weight: 19,120 kg (42,152 lbs)

Source: Freedy Freeman

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