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| Starfish Hill Wind Farm
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| The fire of 2010/10/30
Image credit Fleurieu Multimedia
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Radio interview with fire fighting authority
The ABC's Annette Marner
interviewed SA's Country Fire Service's
David Pearce about fires and wind turbines on 2013/03/04.
(One error I noticed; I believe that there have not been any turbine fires
in Australia other than the three mentioned in SA.)
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Another fire November 2018
Andrea Falvo reported on 2018/11/13 that a
wind turbine had burned at Ravenshoe.
This was one of the turbines of the 18-year-old
Windy Hill Wind Farm.
The fire was confined to the turbine.
How frequent are wind turbine fires?
Renewable Energy Magazine published an
article on 2015/11/17 in which it was
reported that globally one in six thousand wind turbines burn in any given
year.
(A total of 50 turbine fires per year in 300,000 wind turbines.)
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At the time of writing this page there had been three fires in wind turbines in Australia that I knew of: Lake Bonney, Jan. 2006; Cathedral Rocks, Feb. 2009 and Starfish Hill, Oct. 2010; all of them were in the state of South Australia which happens to have more wind power than any other state.
(A forth fire has since occurred, see the note on the right.)
The first fire was due to an electrical fault during maintenance work.
I do not know the cause of the Starfish Hill fire; the other happened
during 'normal' operation.
While I believe there were spot fires around the Cathedral Rocks turbine,
none of these caused a bushfire, but the possibility is there of a
future turbine fire causing a wild fire.
It needs to be said that it is quite likely that the frequency of bushfires
will be reduced by the presence of wind turbines.
Wind turbines on the tops of ridges will safely conduct
many lightning strikes to earth, while, before the
turbines were built, the lightning strikes may well have started fires.
Lightning strikes are a very common cause of wild fires in Australia.
The area around the base of all turbines is kept clear of vegetation
(in the case of the proposed Mount Bryan Wind Farm at least, the SA
Country Fire Service required a cleared area of 40m × 40m), but
a fire in the nacelle, on top of the tower, could result
in sparks and burning material falling on the ground at a distance from
the tower.
Geoff Conway of the Country Fire Authority has said that fires from
agricultural machinery at harvest are a far greater fire risk than are
wind turbines.
The turbine access roads help emergency services access any fire and, as they are often along the tops of ridges,
provide convenient and effective fire-breaks.
Some turbines have built-in fire suppression facilities such as automatic
flooding with carbon dioxide.
This is not used on Suzlon turbines in Australia because of the risk of
asphyxiation of workers; protecting life is held more important than
protecting assets.
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The paragraph on the left is based on advice that I have received on
wind turbines and fire fighting from Andrew Allchurch, Gilbert Group
Officer of the South Australian Country Fire Service.
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Wind power opponents have claimed that Country Fire Service units are not
allowed to go within certain fixed distances of turbine fires.
This is not true; the decision of how to respond is entirely up to the
person in charge at the time.
Much is made by wind turbine opponents of the 300 L of oil in the
turbine gearbox being a fire hazard.
This would be true if the fire was due to failure of the gearbox, but I
had the piece below from Brendan Ryan of Suzlon:
"I worked for Vestas when one of their turbines burned at Lake Bonney.
I remember clearly the inspection crew had checked the inside of the gearbox
and found no signs of heat damage even though the whole external nacelle was
destroyed."
Brendan also told me that all their turbines have
carbon dioxide extinguishers in the nacelle and at the bottom of the turbine.
An article headlined "Wind turbine fires 'ten times more common than thought',
experts warn", written by Emily Gosden was published in a UK newspaper
named The Telegraph on 2014/07/17.
The article was based on a report claimed to have been "published in the
journal Fire Safety Science".
In fact it was published by an organisation named the
International Association for Fire Safety
Science.
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Response from author
One of the authors, Ricky Carvel, responded to an email I sent him, in part,
with the following:
"As far as I am concerned, the message and intent of the paper can actually
be summarised as follows:
There is a small but significant problem with fire in wind turbines.
This is something we can actually do something about by applying fire safety
engineering principles to the design of such turbines.
However, change will only come about if the insurance industry pushes for it."
This is very different to the claims made in the report.
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The report was written by Solomon Uadiale, Evi Urban, Ricky Carvel (all
School of Engineering, University of Edinburgh, UK), David Lange (SP Technical
Research Institute of Sweden) and Guillermo Rein (Department of Mechanical
Engineering, Imperial College London).
In what follows this report will be referred to as Uadiale et al.
Very little of what I've written here is opinion; almost everything can be
confirmed
by referring to the Uadiale et al report, to the sources it references and in
only one case, an article on the Internet by Business Spectator.
Uadiale et al referred back to The Telegraph and to Caithness Windfarm
Information Forum (CWIF) and Wind Action, both anti-wind power organisations, as
authoritative sources.
This is highly questionable in a science paper.
Unjustified conclusion
On the fourth page of the report the authors go from the observation that:
"The newspaper The Telegraph reported that there were about 1500 wind
turbine accidents in the UK between 2006 and 2010 while only about a
tenth as many were recorded by the anti-wind power organisation CWIF."
to the unjustified conclusion that:
"Thus we can argue that the publicly available tip of the iceberg represents
about 10% of the total number of [wind turbine] fires"
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Incidents, not accidents
On 2014/07/21 Business Spectator
reported
the director of Renewable UK as having said that the 1500 figure was for
'incidents' not 'accidents.
Incidents include minor slips, trips or falls as well as actual accidents.
This totally destroys even the tenuous logic used by Uadiale et al to claim
reported fire frequency as being too low.
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Uadiale et al claimed that the number of accidents was independently
confirmed by Renewable UK, but this is highly questionable (see the box on
the right).
This completely unjustified conclusion has been gleefully taken up and
repeated world-wide by unscrupulous anti-wind power organisations.
Of course, unlike work-place accidents on wind farm sites, wind turbine
fires are highly conspicuous and almost invariably will be reported by the
local media.
Dishonest
In the case of a turbine fire at Lake Bonney Wind Farm, Australia,
there were also dishonest specific claims in Uadiale et al.
- The report stated that "some 80,000 ha of national park were destroyed by
a wildfire ignited by the turbine debris" and gave an
Australian Broadcasting Commission report as a reference.
In fact, the ABC Net site referred to mentions a blaze that "consumed more
than 70 hectares" and did not mention wind turbines at all.
In fact it was referring to another fire that happened four years after the
turbine fire.
-
Uadiale et al stated that "Investigation into the cause of the fire found
that the cause was an electrical
failure within the turbine nacelle" while the referenced source stated "We
don't know the cause of it at this stage because we can't get at it, but
it's probably an electrical fault in the turbine".
-
Uadiale et al claimed that "The incident led to the shutdown of the farm,
leaving some 63,000 homes without electricity".
In support of this claim Uadiale et al referred to an anti-wind power Net site
called Wind Action.
The Wind Action page referred to actually stated that it was a "heatwave [that] left 63,000 South Australian homes without power".
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Given the very significant shortcomings in the report and the fact that the
unjustified conclusion – that turbine fires could be up to ten times
as common as has been reported – has been repeated world-wide by the
anti-wind power lobby, I have requested that the International Association
for Fire Safety Science retract this report, at least until it is corrected
and rewritten.
I did not receive a reply.
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(I have written more about the Lake Bonney turbine fire
elsewhere on this page.)
Points 1 and 3 above seems later to have been used in the Discussion and
Conclusions where it was stated that:
"These fires result in financial loss, power loss (which is especially
problematic in remote locations where the wind turbines are a major source
for electricity), as well as secondary damage, for example through road
closures or ignition of wild fires in rural areas."
In fact no evidence is given that a major power loss did result from a
turbine fire or that there was an ignition of a wild fire.
Nonsensical
The basic claim, that turbine fires are under-reported makes no sense.
What could be more conspicuous than a fire in a wind turbine?
Any person nearby would likely get a photo and forward it to a local
newspaper.
All the country newspapers that I know of would jump at the chance to report
on a local wind turbine fire, especially when there was a photo involved.
So far as I know there have been three turbine fires (that destroyed the
turbines involved) here in Australia.
All were well publicised.
It is conceivable that there might have been a fourth that I have not heard
about; it is utterly beyond belief that there could have been 27!
I believe that
Sarah Laurie, a well known and very vocal
anti-wind power
activist based in South Australia, has called electrical cable
joint fires, 1200mm below ground level, 'wind farm fires', so there may
well be some over-reporting of wind turbine fires.
Number of fires per turbine decreasing
It is to the credit of the authors that they included this section.
Quoting from page 2 of the report:
"Because the absolute number of fire accidents tends to increase with the
number of installed turbines, the expected growth in the installation of
wind turbines, also bring the expectation of an increase in the number of
turbine fires.
However, the [ratio] of fire accidents per turbine installed has decreased
significantly since 2002."
Author plays down the report
In an article in
Wind Power Monthly, 2014/07/17,
Guillermo Rein, an engineer in fire safety from Imperial College London
and one of the authors of the report was quoted as saying:
"In terms of fire hazard, the figures are almost negligible.
It is a one in 10,000 probability of a fire.
There is no scandal here.
This number is not zero, but it is minimal.
By comparison with other energy industries, fire accidents are much less
frequent in wind turbines than other sectors, such as oil and gas, which
globally has thousands of fire accidents per year."
So why was he involved in producing the misleading report?
More information should be available
While the Uadiale et al report is seriously flawed,
it is true that the wind power industry could be much more pro-active in
making wind power statistics freely available to the public.
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| Water bombing aircraft at Waterloo Wind Farm, 2017/01/17
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| | This and the following photos were taken by Waterloo
Wind Farm technicians
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| Water bombing aircraft at Waterloo Wind Farm, 2017/01/17
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| Water bombing aircraft at Waterloo Wind Farm, 2017/01/17
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| Water bombing aircraft at Waterloo Wind Farm, 2017/01/17
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Contrary to allegations made by the anti-wind power lobby, wind farms
present no special obstacle to aerial fire-fighting.
The following section, about the fire, was written 2017/01/20.
It is as I understand the situation at the time of writing; but I expect to
learn more in the coming days and weeks.
The photos on the right were taken during a fire which started some kilometres
to the west of Waterloo Wind Farm and burned up to the ridge where the
turbines were.
The turbines were paused by the wind farm operators and the water bombing
aircraft flew wherever they were needed, sometimes between the turbines.
The fire was stopped at the turbine access road along the top of the ridge.
However, a secondary fire was started by a wind-blown ember on the eastern
side of the ridge; this burned back up to the top of the ridge.
I believe that this is the first wildfire in Australia that was at a
wind farm and in which water bombing aircraft were used.
SA in particular
ABC News published the following on
2012/12/11...
The Country Fire Service (CFS) says wind farms do not pose any special
hazards when it comes to fighting fires from the air.
Some wind farm opponents say the turbines create unique hazards in the event
of a fire.
CFS aviation manager David Pearce says the pilots of water bombers view wind
farms like they would power-lines or radio masts.
"Aircraft are only used on a relative minority of fires throughout the fire
season, it's just really another piece of infrastructure in the environment
that we just need to be managing on a risk basis when we're fighting fires,"
he said.
"Any obstacle in the airspace where we're running aircraft is a problem for
aircraft obviously.
"We would treat the wind farms exactly the same way as we treat powerlines
that are reasonably high, also radio masts, television towers or even high
structures."
Victoria in particular
ABC online news 2015/02/25 ran an article
headlined:
"Wind farm buffer zone changes won't impede firefighting says
Victoria's Emergency Management Commissioner"
Quoting the ABC article:
Victoria's Emergency Management Commissioner has rejected claims that
reducing wind farm buffer zones could affect firefighting capabilities.
During the election, Labor promised to reduce the exclusion zone around new
wind farm projects from two kilometres to one.
Wind Industry Reform Victoria represents people living near wind farms and
said the Government's plan would make firefighting "impossible" near houses
close to turbines.
However, Emergency Management Commissioner Craig Lapsley said that was not
the case.
"We make sure that our pilots and our air attack supervisors that fly to
supervise our fire-bombers are aware of wind farms and they build that into
their plan and we haven't had any example where it's restricted our fire
operations," he said.
"I think the key thing is how and which we use aircraft operation in and
around the turbines."
"We have operated around turbines, we'll continue to do so and the buffer
zones we don't believe will impact negatively on any fire operations."
It should be recognised that climate change, if unabated by changing
from fossil fuels to renewable energy, will result in incomparably greater increases in fire hazard than any caused by wind turbines.
Scientific American, June 2011, carried an article stating that fire
danger in the western US states will increase up to six fold with just
one degree higher average temperatures.
Googling something like "fire hazard climate change" will provide many
references showing that wild fires have become more intense and the fire
season has become longer due to climate change, and that this is only going
to get worse in the future unless the world changes to renewable energy.
Just one such is by the
Climate
Council of Australia.
A common cause of fires in Australia is lightning strike, which is covered
at greater depth in
another page.
The risk of wild fires started by lightning strike will be significantly
reduced in an area where the ridge-tops
are lined with wind turbines that safely conduct the lightning to the earth.
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| Grass fire stopped at wind farm access road
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| | Photo credit; REpower service technicians, The Bluff Wind
Farm
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The photo on the right was taken on 2011/12/29 following a grass fire that
burned up to, but not beyond, an access road on The Bluff Wind Farm –
one of the Hallett group.
The grass fire was started by lightning.
A turbine access road was again useful in fighting the
Waterloo fire of 2017/01/17.
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This section added 2019/01/06
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As discussed on
another page on this site wind farm opponents are typically dishonest.
The subject of turbines and fires is no exception.
To the best of my knowledge by 2019 there were about
2300 utility scale turbines in Australia, only three had caught fire and none of these had resulted in more than local spot fires resulting from falling debris.
Of particular relevance to this section there has been a claim on the anti-wind-power site
Stop These Things that "In Australia, wind turbines have so far been responsible for at least four serious bushfires:
- Ten Mile Lagoon in Western Australia in the mid-1990s;
- Lake Bonney, Millicent (SA) in January 2006;
- Cathedral Rocks Wind Farm, Port Lincoln (SA) in February 2009; and
- Starfish Hill (SA) in November 2010."
While at the time of writing this section I have not been able to find anything about the Ten Mile Lagoon fire (if there was one),
as I have shown below, the claims about all the other fires are false.
As discussed
elsewhere on this page a very dubious report made unsupported claims about a bushfire sparked by a turbine fire at the Lake Bonney Wind Farm.
This seems to have been picked up and repeated by wind farm opponents.
There is a short article about the fire, that occurred on 2006/01/22, on the
ABC News site with no mention of any fire beyond the immediate vicinity.
There was also an article written by David Nankervis and published in the South Australian Sunday Mail on 2006/02/12.
Nankervis's article was highly critical of wind power (as is common in the Murdoch-owned media) so there is no reason to believe that he would have minimised any damage caused by the fire.
Nankervis reported that the six fire appliances that attended the blaze couldn't do anything to extinguish the turbine fire because it was so high.
He went on the say:
"Instead, the firefighters watched as fire destroyed the $3 million turbine – which weighs 75 tonnes – and extinguished spot fired ignited by ashes from the turbine blaze"
Wind turbine opponents have blamed this fire on wind turbines, but it was caused by a bird and a power line.
The
Sydney Morning Herald reported on a fire on 17 January 2017 at
Currandooley, near Tarago in the Canberra area.
It seems that the power line involved carries power between Woodlawn and
Capital wind farms, both owned by Infigen.
The SMH article, by Georgina Connery, stated
"The fire started as a result of a bird flying close to high-voltage
powerlines, igniting and landing in dry grass."
The fire burned "almost 3400ha".
It seems that this was something of a freak event.
Birds being electrocuted by going too close to a couple of high voltage
power lines is apparently quite common, but to then set fire to grass is
very unusual.
Of course it could happen on any high voltage power line.
It seems that 2017/01/17 was a very hot day.
Louise Thrower in the Goulburn Post reported Infigen's response to the event:
"It was an unusual event.
We have had over 20 unplanned outages over four years prior to the recent
event and we suspect bird strikes on powerlines were responsible for all of
those.
(But) it has caused only one fire over four years".
There was a fire in one of the
Starfish Hill Wind Farm turbines on the afternoon of 2010/10/30.
It was written up in an article in the Victor Harbor Times on 2010/11/04, but this seems no longer to be available.
The fire caused an estimated $3m damage.
This fire was reported on the anti-wind-power site Wind Watch.
Significantly there was no mention of the fire getting beyond the turbine except for a few spot fires nearby.