Part ownership of a Ripple Wind Turbine, fancy it?

[Moxi]

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/h ... ef2ac40e9e

Well they are starting to het some coverage, admittedly none of the mainstream papers but its a start, hopefully the lost production wont be for long.

Moxi

[AE-NMidlands]

Rather behind the times though:

A new energy company is offering households the chance to cut down on their bills by buying their own share of a wind farm.
Ripple energy, a new startup, allows households and businesses across the country to own small shares of large-scale wind farms and solar parks, the Daily Express and Wales Online report. The firm has a co-operative model where the energy generated will be much cheaper than the market price.

New? But if even the Express is covering it it must be good.. no such thing as bad publicity!
A

[John_S]

It seems to me that the timing is pretty poor. Would have been better to have done it while fundraising for Kirk Hill or wait until more detail on WT3.

[Mr Gus]

I agree John, a bigger more forceful push for media, "woulda, coulda, shoulda" hit home when Kirk hill was being funded, ...BUT, to stress, the fickle @holes in the rag-papers didn't have such a country of frightened people to drop sensational headlines into their willing buyers laps, so anything associated was really a non story & passed by.

The last 4-6 months with the war & big cities like MSE banging on harder than usual (with good reason) changes all that went before & don't ones after...thus now it is a story, classic media, classic spin to flog papers & nothing more.

[Adokforme]

Meanwhile back on a Welsh hillside, I reckon the comms link must have dropped out as there's been no generation since 3am this morning in spite of wind speeds showing around the 13 to 14 mark for much of the day! Perhaps we'll find out tomorrow!

Seems I was wrong, not unusual I know, but a message from Ripple this morning advses there's a problem with the pitch system requiring a visit from the maintenance team so unlikely to be any generation until they arrive and that probably not until tomorrow.

[Joeboy]

Meanwhile back on a Welsh hillside, I reckon the comms link must have dropped out as there's been no generation since 3am this morning in spite of wind speeds showing around the 13 to 14 mark for much of the day! Perhaps we'll find out tomorrow!

Seems I was wrong, not unusual I know, but a message from Ripple this morning advses there's a problem with the pitch system requiring a visit from the maintenance team so unlikely to be any generation until they arrive and that probably not until tomorrow.

I am not a fan of the 5 day a week way they work. I think their response time is abysmal on maintenance. The maintenance contract should have weekend call out. The response should have been yesterday with the maintenance team finishing this morning. Also not a fan of a large burst of wind seems to make the turbine controls or comms systems go tits up on a regular basis. I thought these big turbines were reliable?

Fair enough, it's a big new machine and will have issues so where's the mitigating fast response time in year 1 when it's bedding in?

[Mr Gus]

Here's hoping Kirk hill lessons are learnt off the back of graig fatha & toast remains butter side up.

I doubt general wind farm investors (commercial ones) sit with ears to the ground for changes in the wind & comms data, so it's really is making more of it than it likely is, she to our own renewables interest.

But yeah, old kit fails, understandable, new kit !? ..beyond bedding in time hiccups should be "lemon squeezy" or ripped out & fixed / upgraded, ..this is a proving ground for ramped up scale schemes of investors, so dropped out data necessitating frequent site visits may feature in downtime charts & maintenance sheets negatively.

[Joeboy]

A repair by midafternoon tomorrow is 56 hours downtime (give or take), 1/3rd of a whole week. No where near good enough. I wish I'd kept a record of the volume of fails and environmental conditions at the time. I do know that its fell over (figuratively speaking) in strong winds a few times. Sunny side up right enough and this is I think a new fault being worked through. That response time though....

[marshman]

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[Joeboy]

Don't entirely disagree with the "faster 24/7" maintenance response but an observation I would make is that you are focusing on one single wind turbine. I live around 5 miles from the Little Cheyne Court Windfarm. It consists of some 26 wind turbines and went operational in 2009 - 11 years ago. As it is visible from just about anywhere on the Romney Marshes I often glance over and it is not at all uncommon to see one or two turbines stationary when all the others are churning away. I have never noted which ones or for how long they are still for but I will now. I suspect single turbine "issues" are more common then realised by those outside the industry, it just doesn't show up in the output stats for a wind farm with multiple units, hard to spot the difference between one or two units dropping out and the windspeed dropping slightly, whereas a single turbine it is painfully obvious as the total output will be zero and of course you guys are watching the output like a hawk 'cos you have a vested financial interest. Also farms with multiple units will likely be able to justify one or two permanent or local on call staff, more difficult to justify for a single remote turbine.

All that is not to say that it should be proven technology and not suffering that many "outages". Maybe they are just on a steep learning curve and the are just teething issues which will be sorted before the "winter" season. After all the big offshore windfarms cannot afford to have continuous problems.

There must be figures somewhere for the MTBF of the latest generations of wind turbines - both on and off shore.

I agree and expect they won't be top of the maintenance company phonelist with the one turbine.