You are reading a single comment by @gbj_tester and its replies.
Click here to read the full conversation.
London Fixed Gear and Single-Speed is a community of predominantly fixed gear and single-speed cyclists in and around London, UK.
This site is supported almost exclusively by donations. Please consider donating a small amount regularly.
@gbj_tester
Normal for Scotland, and therefore normal for a wind farm sited on top of a hill in Scotland
Unless you have more data than I already alluded to, the recent storm hit a ~15-year high for recorded gusts, around 8mph below the record.
Obviously one would hack whatever controller was in play, I just used Stuxnet as a known example.
What follows is speculation from somebody without your detailed knowledge of the subject, so feel free to mark my work:
The fact that it caught fire, rather than breaking up as other turbines have in high winds, suggests some possible failure modes and over-speed wouldn't be the first one on my list - you surely couldn't generate enough heat in even a failed shaft bearing. I would expect there to be very robust last-resort over-current protection, so an electrical fault, while possible, ought to be an unlikely candidate for fire starting. That's why I settled on the failure to coordinate blade feathering and turbine braking. It would be feasible to mechanically interlock these systems to prevent braking of a turbine set to a power-producing pitch, but I'm not sure that one would do so as a failure in the linkage could hold off the brake even when feathered, which seems like a higher risk than the one you're trying to mitigate. If the feather/brake interlock is implemented in software, that provides a potential attack vector/catastrophic bug.
Of course, the other possibility is a particularly fatty and therefore combustible goose was perched on the generator housing and got struck by lightning. Stranger things have happened in power generation/distribution accidents.