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Ethanol, a non renewable resource.
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johnny skeptical
Posted 3/18/2018 21:04 (#6650429 - in reply to #6648541)
Subject: RE: Ethanol, a non renewable resource.



n.c.iowa		So here is a final epithet for this thread, I debated whether to tell this story or not, but I talked to one of the main participants and he gave me the green light.

Soooo, as it turns out a local municipal electric company, joined forces with 7 other municipalities in purchasing and erecting three 750 kilowatt zond wind turbines, as it turns out just down the road from me, 20 years ago.

So after much ballyhoo in 1998 about the whole project, after a couple years there wasn’t much mention of it. About 7-10 years ago they were turned off, one generator need some serious repair, and one of the other turbines had a electrical glitch in the tower somewhere that kept kicking the turbine out.
The zond company was purchased by Enron, which went bankrupt, the remaining assets were then purchased by GE, so a lot of the parts for the turbine are NLA, the company that was doing the maintence disbanded or went bankrupt, so like I said the turbines were to be decommissioned and removed.

The other 7 partners in the venture wanted to transfer to the one local utility full ownership of the project, so that seemed like a decent plan, until the head of the local utility did alittle fact finding.

It was gonna cost in the neighbor hood of $200-250,000 per tower to remove them and return the area to like before installation conditions. The only items that might had a value above salvage price where the transformers, and possibly the turbine blades, but even then it would cost more to get a crane and crew in to get the blades down, than they were worth.
They talked to a couple of local salvage companies about salvaging the metal components, the salvage companies just laughed.

So they were in a pickle indeed, fortunately they have been able to find a maintenance/repair company that was able to repair the turbines and get them operating again for a reasonable cost..

The problem is that the most of the partners in the windmill project can buy wholesale electricity for $2.8 cents/killowatt (they actually own generating capacity in a couple of coal fired plants).
So what he relayed to me is that by fixing and operating the turbines they are losing less money than they would have lost by razing the towers. I assume that they are generating some government credits, but that didn’t come up in the conversation.

Edited by johnny skeptical 3/18/2018 21:08
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