a day in the life... Julia Rhodes
Site Manager for Renewable Energy Systems
Featuring: Charles Thompson (16) and Luke Desmond (15)
13.00
It took about four hours by car to get up to Coal Clough in Lancashire where the turbines were. They seemed impossible to find but once we got over the tenth hill on our small road we were gobsmacked to see this amazing view.
13.20
After we met in the car park we walked down a track where five of the turbines are. It's amazing how big the turbines are! We are the specs in the corner of this picture. Apparently the new turbines that Julia's company, Renewable Energy Systems (or RES for short), build are three times as big, and these are just little ones!
13.30
First we went past the turbines down a long, freezing and of course very windy track to the transformer house. Julia had to check the slates were all on the roof and there was no vandalism or anything. We went inside and she explained how the electricity generated by the turbines is stepped up through the transformers so it was the same as the national grid. There were a lot of complicated looking switches and things that said don't touch - so we didn't.
Also in the hut Julia had to check the harnesses which engineers and other workers have on to make climbing up the turbines safe.
13.50
Outside the hut she showed us the circuit breakers and isolation units and the outside of the main transformer.
From there it goes into the ground in three thick cables and you can see where it comes up the other side of the field and joins into the National Grid at the nearest pylon.
14.00
Then we walked back up the track to check each of the turbines was OK. First sign of something wrong is if they sound bad so we listened out for anything unusual. More info..
They make a medium loud swishing noise but it wouldn't really be a problem unless you had a house right under it! Each turbine has a metal steps up to a door, each with a padlock to stop curious people getting in. You have to have special training to be allowed to climb up the inside and know how the safety harness works and all that so we didn't get to climb. This is what looking up the inside is like. More info..
14.30
Julia showed us how to stop the blades from the control panel inside the turbine. The blades stop after a few goes round. When they are moving at their normal speed the tips of the blades are going at 100 miles per hour.
15.30
They slow by each blade twisting its thick edge round into the wind, and not catching it anymore. The whole of the top bit the blades are attached to can turn to catch the most energy depending where the wind is blowing from.
The last thing Julia had to do before we headed back to the car was change the data card in the computerised Met Mast, which measures in great detail all the wind speeds and temperature and so on.
Though it was a freezing day in the north, Julia's next trip is to Portugal where she's managing a wind farm project along a ridge near the sea. She said although she's gone away a bit from doing the engineering herself, she couldn't be a manger without the background in engineering. Here's the project in Portugal. Nice work Julia.
Renewable energy is a great thing to get into especially now people have realised that we can't go on forever with fossil fuels. RES are going to have wind farms all over the world - so hopefully loads of jobs available by the time we leave uni!
If you want to know more about Wind Energy then check out Julia's favourite site...
http://www.windpower.org/core.htm
To find out more about Julia visit the www.noisenet.ws site
Turbines
We'd come to join Julia on a routine check of the wind turbines on this site. Her background is in engineering, she said she studied Production Engineering for her first degree and then did a masters in Renewable Energy at Loughborough University..
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Transformer
The electricity from the turbines is a steady 690 Volts. Each Turbine has it's own mini transformer to get it up to 11 Kilo Volts (KV) and then the main transformer collects all this electricity from each turbine and steps it up to 132KV.
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More Info 1
There is a danger that being so tall they will be struck by lightening a lot, so each turbine has a lightening conductor and then the ground around them has lots of copper wire in it to spread out the lightening into the earth around.
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More Info 2
The first sign of trouble would be oil all over the floor at the bottom of the turbine, because that would mean a dodgy gearbox at the top, but all our turbines were fine.
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Met Mast
They get as much data about local conditions as possible and compare it with how much electricity the turbines produce. If they build up enough data then they start to be able to predict when something might go wrong in advance. This is the technique known as Condition Monitoring, and will be really useful for sea turbines which you can't even get to at all in bad weather.
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