Gearbox Failures in Wind Turbines

[DriveHard]

A telling graph, this was Ontario's wind output last summer during our highest demand months. The fleet is ~5,000MW.
View attachment 31573

Iowa is doing much better ;-)

 

[OVERKILL]

Iowa is doing much better ;-)

View attachment 31796

Yes, though that doesn't graph output relative to installed capacity, just output relative to peak output, so it doesn't give a proper profile of performance relative to what's installed. But you can see it still has a summer "slump", though nowhere near as bad as Ontario's.

It's also not granular enough to show per-day performance. Some of our periods, as you can see from my chart, span a week or two and then it's windy for a stint, so the month might not look awful overall, but it could have had a week where wind was close to zero for example.

I'll toss together a graph like mine for the data you've presented to show a different perspective. Unfortunately, since I don't have hourly data, I can't make it as detailed as the ones I produce for Ontario.

Give me a bit.

 

[OVERKILL]

OK, here's a monthly chart for Iowa 2019:

As I noted, it's unfortunately a bit less valuable graphing monthly average output versus weekly, daily or ideally hourly (what I do for Ontario) as the average doesn't capture the massive variability inherent in wind generation and thus the stand-in gas capacity making up for it.

August had a capacity factor of 18%, the worst month, which, while better than Ontario's summer average, isn't great. The best month was April at 39%. You then look at your annual demand profile to determine the "value" of wind output. Our peak months in Ontario are those summer months where wind output is in the toilet, that may not be the case for Iowa, so the capacity value varies depending on that.