Storm Gerrit
By Paul Homewood
It’s little wonder kids are having mental problems because of the climate change scare, with outrageously false reporting like this:
The 85mph claims were based on a single wind gust measured in Kincardineshire, in NE Scotland. The Met Office have not said exactly where, but it will inevitably be either an exposed coastal cliff top, or a high altitude site:
https://twitter.com/metoffice/status/1740051223930118443
All of the other sites listed are unrepresentative exposed locations. There is no evidence of anything like these wind speeds away from exposed coasts.
https://twitter.com/Dedicated_Being/status/1740329649492885551
The wind turbine destroyed was in Ayrshire, but we don’t know where. However, at Girvan, a typical coastal site in the county, average wind speeds reached only 27mph yesterday, when the wind turbine blew apart, probably indicative of 45 to 50mph gusts. This is not an unusually strong wind by any means, though of course the wind turbine could have been on top of a hill.
What is also noticeable if you watch the video, is that the trees are barely moving, something they certainly would have in a real gale.
https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/@2648626/historic
I am reminded that in the days before they started giving them silly names, gales were merely referred to as Westerlies!.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Was tgat just a three metre windmill?
OK….missed the £ sign. 😃
Looking closer at the pic, it looks like one of those horizontal turbines with vertical blades…???
The Darrieus wind turbine is a type of vertical axis ….
Doesn’t look so to me. Once it comes apart there is a resemblance.
Jolly dangerous
Sudden wind gusts are difficult to foresee. Maybe wind turbines should be shut down more frequently 🙂
It might be this one:
Google Earth, Lat/Long: 55.561747, -4.320457
Upslope 760 feet, from Firth of Clyde 13 miles to the west.
Looks like good sleuthing… Did you find extra location hints in the twitter thread? I tried looking it up in the database of renewables but got no hits either by location or using local place names. However, it is clearly marked on Ordnance Survey 1:50,000 map, and visible in Google satellite view.
I found the following:
“A spokesperson for the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service said: “We were alerted to a reports of a fire within a wind turbine at 10.28am on Wednesday, 27 December near Newhouse Farm, Sorn.”
The location of the gust is alleged to be Inverbervie Location: 56.852, -2.264
Altitude: 134m above sea level and indeed atop a seaside hill/cliff just North of the town.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/forecast/gfn7kmx6u#?date=2023-12-29
The trees in the photo don’t look particularly battered by the wind.
When I read the headline, I thought that Storm Gerrit was either a rambunctious soccer player or perhaps a fashion model. Or a male family member of Stormy Daniels!
Whose bad idea was it to put a wind turbine on the top of a hill anyway? More likely than an 85 mile per hour gust is a 45 mph gust “shredding” a worn-out, poorly maintained wind turbine. They aren’t exactly built to last. They aren’t ‘green’ or ‘sustainable’ either, requiring steel manufactured by lots of fossil fuel-intensive smelters.
Here’s a brief video for y’all to enjoy. The first image is an ironic comment on the content. I recommend listening with volume on so you can hear the wind turbine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcYRWL1Q52Q
From personal experience the top of Byne Hill, a shortish walk from the coast car park near Girvan, can be extremely windy.
https://www.walkhighlands.co.uk/glasgow/byne-hill.shtml
At least one wind farm nearby…
Assel Valley wind farm site is located 5 km south of Girvan
https://asselvalley.coop/the-site/
This is a simple – and not unusual – wind turbine failure. As Ellie K comments this is an isolated, old, and probably poorly maintained, wind turbine. Both older and modern wind turbines reach their rated output capacity at wind speeds of 12-15 metres per sec (27-33 mph). They are designed to shut down in wind speeds above 25 m/s (56 mph). Almost certainly the generator controller failed or the blades weren’t feathering correctly, thus causing stresses that the machinery was not designed to cope with.
Small and medium wind turbines are quite prone to fail in high and gusty wind conditions. Anyone who uses them should know this as the cost of building really robust ones is simply too high. I run a rural wireless broadband operator in the Scottish Borders. We use small wind turbines at remote off-grid sites because solar panels are not adequate in winter. Two of our wind turbines (an expensive and pretty robust model) broke up in the recent storms, so (a) wind conditions were pretty bad though most of our turbines are at 350-650 metres above sea level, and (b) you have to allow for such failures when specifying equipment. Normally we lose 1 or 2 turbines each winter out of a total of about 12. Either bearings fail or turbines shed blades.