The greatest mistake you can make in maintaining your wind farm is waiting until something breaks to fix it. While this might seem like the most intuitive chain of events at first glance, the truth is that countless dollars can be saved through proper upkeep and preventative measures rather than leaving the turbines to their business and letting them wear themselves out. Moreover, maintenance and upgrading of your equipment may help to reduce bird deaths in the turbines, saving both the local wildlife and money spent on collision repairs.
Do Wind Turbines Require a Lot of Maintenance?
A properly cared for wind farm requires far less wind turbine maintenance than a neglected one, but as with any machinery or complex equipment, there will always be some maintenance issues. Luckily, maintenance methods are advancing at a remarkable rate, and new innovations are constantly hitting the maintenance market.
Common Wind Turbine Maintenance Issues
Anyone who's been in the wind energy business for more than a minute can tell you that wind turbines, while brilliant machinery, come with a slew of potential maintenance needs. Common issues include:
Generator failure
Gearbox failure
Blade failure
Bird deaths and other nature conservancy issues
Many of these problems arise from the normal wear and tear on the wind turbine mechanisms, such as the generator, which is responsible for converting wind energy into mechanical energy, or the gearbox, where dirty lubrication fluids or fluctuating temperatures can cause deterioration of critical components. These types of issues are often caused by the environment's impact on the turbine, for instance intense weather or other harsh conditions. However, there are also issues, such as bird deaths, that reflect the turbine's impact on the environment, and these issues are equally important in long-run sustainability forecasts.
Bird Death Prevention at Wind Farms
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that turbine issues cause between 140,000 and 500,000 bird deaths a year, killing over 200 different bird species including songbirds, eagles, hawks, and falcons. These casualties most often occur when birds collide with the turbine blades and are more common in regions such as California than in the Great Plains.
The most effective way to prevent bird deaths at a wind farm is to choose the site carefully before construction begins. By studying bird flight patterns and other environmental factors in determining the wind farm location, future bird deaths can be minimized through predictive maintenance.
Once the wind farm is up and running, protecting birds gets a bit more complicated, but innovative new solutions are tackling the problem head-on. One promising new technique is the use of smart cameras that automatically sense approaching birds and halt wind turbine activity until the birds are at a safe distance again. These camera towers are stationed throughout the wind farm at strategic intervals and are equipped with highly sophisticated software that allows them to recognize and predict the movement patterns of protected birds in the area. Though this is a new technology and its efficacy is still being examined, initial studies have found that smart cameras can reduce eagle deaths by up to 82%.
Wind Turbine Maintenance Checklist
Predictive maintenance is an operations and maintenance strategy that protects your assets by taking preemptive action to keep your turbines in perfect condition. Take a preventative approach with predictive maintenance strategies:
Don't forget to plan for the turbines' effect on the environment, not just vice versa.
Get help and wind farm maintenance training from the best professionals on the market.
Wield the power of automated workflows to keep your maintenance costs low and your wind farm running smoothly.
Wind farms are the future of energy, and predictive maintenance is the future of wind farms!
