4 ms·

You still have to maintain the existing turbines. Maintaining 20 year old hardware that's exposed to the forces of nature quickly costs more than building some

You still have to maintain the existing turbines. Maintaining 20 year old hardware that's exposed to the forces of nature quickly costs more than building something new in the same place. In particular when the 20 year old hardware has been from the beginning of a time of extensive R&D, so that new parts for these old models might be hard and expensive to get because all the cost-efficient producers are already on to the new stuff. Try maintaining a 10 year old server (10 years instead of 20 to account for significantly more physical wear out in the open) without replacing the mainboard, CPU, RAM and disks with newer models. Same issue: industrial production moved on. The main difference is that nobody cares if you replace a 1U server with a newer 1U server.

phicoh 5y ago
Ah, it seems that most many wind turbines have a design lifetime of 20 years. I guess that living in a country with many wind mills that are hundreds of years old, made me assume that a wind turbine would also have a technical life of more than two decades.
- pgeorgi 5y ago
  Depends on what you want the wind mill to do for you: slow and steady pumping water up a dike exerts somewhat less force on all the materials than trying to maximize electric output you get out of each rotation. Also, there's no several 100% efficiency increase in upgrading a wind mill, so the parts are probably still compatible...
  - phicoh 5y ago
    If you feel a whole wind mill like this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Gekroonde_Poelenburg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Gekroonde_Poelenburg shake when it is in operation, then that is very far from a slow and steady operation. In fact, most wind turbines feel far more 'slow and steady'. This one is not very old, only 150 years. This one (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Otter,_Amsterdam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Otter,_Amsterdam) is almost 400 years old. But I have not been in it. I assumed that with a 20 year old wind turbine, the money you make from the electricity it produces would be more than maintainance costs. Even if better turbines exist, if you can't build a new one in the same place, it might make sense to keep it running. Of course, if the maintainance costs are indeed high enough that you don't make any money, then it make sense to take it down.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

phicoh 5y ago

Ah, it seems that most many wind turbines have a design lifetime of 20 years. I guess that living in a country with many wind mills that are hundreds of years old, made me assume that a wind turbine would also have a technical life of more than two decades.

pgeorgi 5y ago
Depends on what you want the wind mill to do for you: slow and steady pumping water up a dike exerts somewhat less force on all the materials than trying to maximize electric output you get out of each rotation. Also, there's no several 100% efficiency increase in upgrading a wind mill, so the parts are probably still compatible...
- phicoh 5y ago
  If you feel a whole wind mill like this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Gekroonde_Poelenburg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Gekroonde_Poelenburg shake when it is in operation, then that is very far from a slow and steady operation. In fact, most wind turbines feel far more 'slow and steady'. This one is not very old, only 150 years. This one (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Otter,_Amsterdam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Otter,_Amsterdam) is almost 400 years old. But I have not been in it. I assumed that with a 20 year old wind turbine, the money you make from the electricity it produces would be more than maintainance costs. Even if better turbines exist, if you can't build a new one in the same place, it might make sense to keep it running. Of course, if the maintainance costs are indeed high enough that you don't make any money, then it make sense to take it down.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]