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  • A normal feature of the design life of wind farms, or of Scottish weather, which are you choosing?

    Either way, the recent gusts are the highest recorded, and in any case not 'normal'. They are 'extreme'. And yes, wind farms have extreme design standards, but this is only one turbine that has caught fire amongst rather a lot installed in Scotland, so I would suspect a little more complex. And there is no proof yet (no doubting that there might be), that it is due to the extreme wind.

    Design life of a wind farm is 25 years (typical UK planning permits only 20yrs in place), but they are designed to withstand the 100yr max 3s gust. Hell, we may have just had it!

    Stuxnet - and I haven't come across it directly - appears to hit Siemens Industrial Software (thanks, wikiP). Ardrossan, where this turbine is, consists of Vestas turbines - they may have some Siemens generators, but they will* not* be running any Siemens software.

    It would be pretty fruitless to send a computer virus to try and overrun a wind turbine, there are too many physical sensors that would trip it out in the event of an IT override. In this case, one of the physical sensors would have failed, which is a rare event.

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