Electrical systems within wind turbines, including generators, converters, and control systems, can experience failures due to insulation degradation, thermal stresses, and electrical transients. Generators are particularly vulnerable to overheating and insulation breakdown, leading to short circuits or open circuits.
Wind hazards pose a great threat to the stability of power supply to utilities. Strong winds damage transmission system component. Collapsed poles and broken conductors cause large area of outages in distribution network.
Though green energy critics were quick to blame wind farms for the desperate situation, ERCOT’s figures showed a much bigger shortfall (30GW) from the failure of fossil gas, coal and nuclear sources. And the wind turbines’ troubles were largely down to the fact that they had not been designed for such cold conditions.
But winter also comes with a problem: freezing weather. Even light icing can produce enough surface roughness on wind turbine blades to reduce their aerodynamic efficiency, which reduces the amount of power they can produce.
Turbines can also be stopped for safety reasons, to prevent ice being thrown from the blades. “The greatest risk of falling ice is if the wind turbine is iced up and the temperature then rises or if the sun comes out and heats up parts of the wind turbine,” says Svensk Vindenergi, the Swedish Wind Energy Association.
Control systems, which manage the operational parameters of the turbine, are susceptible to software glitches and sensor failures. Environmental factors such as lightning strikes, extreme temperatures as shown in Fig. 1, humidity, and corrosion significantly impact wind turbine reliability.