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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MJB" data-source="post: 3302155" data-attributes="member: 88928">Here I'm with you. I suspect that in areas where wind turbines have a high unserviceability rate a number of factors are in play. In Spain, the awarding of the earliest contracts was shrouded in secrecy, ostensibly to prevent protestors mounting a  campaign for sensible siting or to delay the projects in the courts, but I suspect it had more to do with awarding the contracts to politicians' friends. A number of early wind farms have been closed down or truncated because of unreliability, or in a few cases, being on migration routes of the larger, less manoeuvrable migrant birds. Many early contracts also omitted any tear-down/site restoration components, probably for pennypinching/greed reasons; most early contracts omitted entirely any realistic environmental assessment.Tied in with that was the rush to put together the designs: for political reasons, in-country designs in many countries tended to be favoured over proven designs, which leads to competing, but lower-reliability components being selected, especially because this is a new engineering discipline at the present scale. Many earlier projects omitted reliability design entirely.Reliability engineering almost always is more expensive in a project's design phase, but usually results in a high mean time between failure (MTBF) or replacement (MTBR) in-use. Most projects in Central Europe are reliability-engineering based nowadays, and contracts include replacement/teardown/restoration costs, which is probably why these relatively more expensive systems have a patchy record of adoption in other countries that install equipment at the lowest possible price.It's difficult to find out these aspects for UK-based projects, although I suspect that the offshore installations, because they have the additional problem of saltwater corrosion thrust upon them, have more reliable components.I think that the UK's obsession with bean-counting has ensured that many of our engineering projects, not only in the renewables industry, are far from the best they could be, simply to minimise costs at every stage - think of the overhead catenary variety on our railways, for example. I've been involved with several large engineering projects (not in the wind turbine field!) where politicians insisted that a randomly-chosen cost percentage reduction be applied, and I've seen other cases where no strategic costing was ever applied by manufacturers bidding for contracts, just finger-in-the-wind stuff: both 'methods' run a high risk of project failure or reduced effectiveness.MJB</blockquote>

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