WILLMAR — The Willmar Municipal Utilities wind turbine report for May 2024 was mixed, with one of the two wind turbines producing no energy and the other having the highest availability ever.
“Turbine number three is working just fine,” said Maintenance and Facilities Supervisor Kevin Marti during Monday’s Municipal Utilities Commission meeting. “(We’ve) never had an availability as high as we've seen with May’s turbine three — it was actually 99.9%. It probably missed 10 minutes while the guys shut it down for one reason or another (and it) produced 347,166 kilowatt-hours.” Oscillating Wind Turbine
Turbine four, however, continued to have electrical issues that started in late April. The wind turbine technicians, Willmar Municipal Utilities electrical engineer Jeron Smith, a former DeWind engineer and ABB Group, the company that makes one of the components in the turbine, have been working together to diagnose the problem, according to Marti.
“Hopefully, they're going to be able to do some programming this morning and, if we get some wind, we'll see if it works, but just kind of continuing to work through the issues in turbine four right now,” Marti added while giving his report Monday.
The total kilowatt output of both turbines so far in 2024 is 2,921,861 kilowatt-hours and the annual cost to operate the turbines year-to-date is about 1.5 cents per kilowatt-hour, according to Marti. The cumulative cost since the turbines began producing power in 2009 is 14.34 cents per kilowatt-hour.
Commissioner Dave Baumgart asked Marti if the issue in turbine four was a parts issue or a programming issue.
Marti explained that in late April, the shaft between the gearbox and the wind drive into the generator was spinning too fast and damaged some components.
“This is kind of what happens with wind turbines, you get something that happens and you fix that and try and fire it off and then 12 things back on the line are damaged as well,” he said. “They've been working through those dozen things since the end of April, basically, different components and testing, breaker cards, diodes, you name it.”
As of Monday, the final problem was a control module called an AVR, which is about the size of a tablet, according to Marti. The Utilities has spares, but they need to be programmed.
“As you work through all those 10 or 12 things that you found when the big thing went out, you keep your fingers crossed that when you cover all those bases, that everything works again,” Marti said. “We won't know until they get it programmed and the wind picks up enough to try and sync it in.”
He noted that if it was a major component that went out, such as the gearbox, the wind drive or the generator, turbine four would likely be shut down permanently.
100kw Wind Turbine “It's a fairly small component, and the company is still around that makes this AVR component, so we're able to get some support,” Marti added.