Sorry, but you have bought the same 'logic' as Uhlmann did, and it is plain wrong.
Yes, wind turbines will park in very strong winds (for the majority, we are talking about sustained mean wind speeds of 100km/h+ for this to occur). Yes, it is to protect the turbines. They are designed to produce power from strong winds, but are effectively a massive sail when producing, and in extreme winds the physical load on the mast becomes too much for safe operation. In the case of SA this week, this might have been the case for a handful of wind turbines across the state where local conditions were extreme. It certainly was not the case for the majority of wind turbines across the state that were happily producing power in mean winds well below 80km/h.
When the majority of the state's high voltage transmission lines were taken out by some very localised weather (mostly tornadoes by observer reports), wind was happily supplying around 800MW of power to the grid (yes, around 40% of the load). No parking issues there. But without a means to deliver this power to where it is being consumed, they park as well. No load, no generation. This is not the fault of the turbine, or extreme winds affecting that turbine. It is a fault of the transmission network and exactly the same thing would (and did) happen to the fossil fuel generators as well.
The fossil fuel industry has taken the 'Merchants of Doubt' approach so well perfected by big tobacco by using a few truths conflated with disputable logic to introduce doubt where none exists.
Would Cellcubes help keep the grid more stable if the transmission network was intact? Absolutely. Would they have been of benefit this week in SA? Not to the entire grid. Once the high voltage network came down, the whole grid was going black no matter what (although why load-shedding was not effective in keeping at least some of the grid powered is an open question). But Cellcubes would have been very useful at a local level, if they had been set up to 'island', or effectively isolate themselves from the rest of the grid and only supplied power locally. Very handy for hospitals, supermarkets, airports, traffic management and so many others that either had failures or problems with backup diesel generation or no backup generation at all.
AVL Price at posting:
1.7¢ Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
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