Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire At the top of a wind tower

i see the chain guard in the last pic... what's the chain for???

those things have fascinated me since they started going up... pretty cool pics...

Squatch----Thanks and you are right it is interesting. I have an aquaintance that is building small backyard prototypes and tinkering.

Is that Vantage?

Our wind farm is between bickleton and roosevelt. We have 132 towers. It is the largest Public utility district owned wind farm in the nation or it was last time i heard.

I'm not sure about the chain guard? Are you talking about the green sticker with the black chain on it? If that's what your talking about that's a good question i'll have to ask anyone if they know what it is for. I know where the holes at they use that for setting the gearbox in the nacelle at the factory. Hopefully i answered your question. Thanks

Great stuff Squatch....and a really informative thread! Looking forward to more.

+1 I love this kinda chit!

Awesome. Thanks for posting. My buddies and I were just talking about them the other day.

Mike

Great post and pics!!!

I hunt around Vantage Highway (just outside Ellensburg) which has a bunch of these wind towers (Whiskey Jack area). I've always wondered if they impact the usual and accustomed migration routes of both the muleys and elk? Do they seem to "accept" them and carry on as usual, make end runs around them or take huge detours to avoid them?

What's your experience or thoughts?

Thanks.............

Magnumb----Whiskey Jack..or Whiskey Dick?

I hunt around the Whiskey Dick so I'm not be facious...for once.

Which was at one time one of the best coyote hunting areas in Eastern WA. Not so much now I think.

That's the only issue I have with them.

My bad........Whiskey Dick........next to Chinaman's Cap.

Took my biggest muley buck at the 'ole horse corral at the base of the hill. It no longer exists and we can't hunt that immediate area anymore, but some good memories remain.

Way cool pics

I would guess they do take out migrant songbirds at night, especially under some conditions, but I dunno they are significant compared to all the communication towers going up everywhere.

Ain't the tips of those blades travelling at considerable speed? Be a hazard to local birds of prey I'd guess, unless they learn to avoid them.

We have a bunch in Texas, one thing I've noticed is that at any given time, half or more wont be running.

Birdwatcher

That job blows.









Squatch thanks for sharing. Cool photos. I have seen more and more show up along the Columbia River corridor when I drive to see the inlaws. They are also getting ramped up here in Wyoming. Lord knows we have enough wind.

The blade tips at full speed(16rpm) is 156 mph. Thats the part that usually gets the birds. I know there is a summer migration of bats through the gorge area. We do get a few bats i don't know the specific numbers off the top of my head.

Yes the job blows! lol

Some of are guys were in Goldendale and a lady came up to them ranting and raving about how we needs to shut our big fans off so the wind would quit blowing. She was dead serious.

My bos emails us a lot of articles too that talk about what some people think about wind towers and a funny one that i got was another lady talking about how she wanted to su b/c she thought we were speeding up earths rotation. There are a lot of things like that. It's really pretty funny but i think there is a lack of public knowledge on wind towers. I'll write up a big deal on this stuff tomorrow. Headed to graduation parties the rest of today.Thanks guys

Very neat pics; thanks for sharing! Oh, and be careful up there.

Bird watcher: Some towers have what's called vector management. Our towers run in lines from north to south. If the wind is blowing from the north it will shut down every other turbine so that there isn't as much wind turbulence. We have things on the blades that is supposed to get rid of the wind turbulence by about 600 yards. Most of the turbines are 300 yards apart north to south. The turbulence is hard on the turbines and can cause them to shut down with diffenent kinds of errors. Also there is a new technology out that can sense birds within so many yards of the towers and will shutdown the towers. We don't have that yet , but we are definetly looking into it.

Our towers at full speed turn at 16 rpm. There is a gearbox up there that has a 1:91 ratio and the generator turns at 1450Rpm at full speed. It is a four pole generator that is frequency controlled so it can produce in the lower winds at lower rpm. The tower can go from full speed to zero rpm in 7 seconds depending on what kind of error comes up. We do a lot of testing up tower after we get done fixing something and we run the towers while we are uptop to see if the error will come back. Sometimes we get to experience the E-stop scenarios and when the wind is blowing and it shutdown we go for quite a ride.

The nacelle is slanted 6 degrees up to keep the blades away from the tower. If you watch in higher winds the blades will flex back towards the tower. That is why they slant it.

When a tower is at full production the power flows down the tower and in the base we have electrical filters that basically smooth out the sign waves in the power so people can use it at there house. It changes the power from Ac to Dc then back to Ac then it goes out on the grid to the substation. From the substation it goes to a Dam and connects to its grid. 50% of are power automatically goes to california.

We have about 60 miles of road on our wind farm and over 100 miles of going back to the substation. Our whole site is about 30 Square miles. We use up 2% of the land and the rest of it is farmland and Wildlife refuge. Our site does not allow hunting .
Other wind farms do, but ours doesn't. We see a ton of deer, coyotes, bobcats, chukar, huns, doves, and snakes out there. The deer use the tower for shade in the summer time. Mice go into the towers for shelter, so the snakes try to follow them if they can. A couple of weeks ago we had a rattlesnake with about 3 buttons in the base.

We do a break in service after the turbine has been running for 500 hours. Then we do an annual service each year there after. The services take about a week each. They consist of changing out oil filters, checking oil levels, calibrating all sensors, doing torque checks of all bolts, tensioning bolts(stretching them and then tightening down the nuts), Checking alignment of the generator to the gearbox, checking grounding systems, cleaning, lubing systems, refilling lube systems, and blade inspections. In the winter time we have as many heaters as the circiut will run up there and trying to stay warm.


The Bases of the windtower are formed with re-bar and have 500 cubic feet of concrete. I used to know how many truck loads that was but i forgot how much can go into one truck. They set up a batch plant on the site when they are building it so then they don't have to travel as far.

Well if you guys have anymore questions i'd be more than happy to help answer them. I have more pics on my work computer but this one is when we are doing annual service someone took this snapshot.

How is the top connected to the tower? That must have to resist a lot of forces?

Very cool pics...Thanks for sharing.

At the top of the tower section there is a flat ring that kind of looks like a rotor of a truck. Then there are two piece caliper looking things and there are 22 of them. They attacth on the bottom side of the ring and then to the top. They have it set up this way so then the tower can still spin into and out of the wind.

There is a a huge gear around the outside and these yaw gears slide onto the sides of it when it's erected. This helps to keep it very tight to the tower. When the wind is blowing hard the yaw gears constantly have to turn the tower back into the wind. The yaw gears is what we call them it's a danish term i believe. They aways have power. They work in what's called plugging. They have power which prevents them from being able to turn. This is how they are used as a brake to lock the nacelle into the wind. They do have to resist a lot of force. I would say the whole yaw system is one part of the towers that we are always working on. The other one is the gearbox. It is a weak link so all the bigger companies are trying to eliminate it and go with a direct drive.

Hopefully i explained it so you can kind of picture how it looks.

Thanks guys

Very educational post. I always wondered.

What manufacturers do you typically have manufacturing the turbines? I know GE & Siemens are major players in this market, but there must be others. I sell transformers for wind farm applications in my business. Thanks for all the information.