Berrybank 1 Wind Farm recommences operations, on Friday morning 7th February 2025

We’ve already written and collated two articles here pertaining to the failure of one of the wind turbines at the Berrybank site:

1)  We wrote ‘Berrybank 1 and Berrybank 2 Wind Farms offline since Tuesday morning 4th February following wind turbine collapse’ on Wednesday 5th February; and

2)  We followed this with ‘Storms on February 4, 2025, and links to wind farm outages’ on Thursday

3)  So this is the third article, over three consecutive days… (we hit ‘publish’ a bit later today than initially envisaged by virtue of a few higher priority activities).

Restart of production at Berrybank 1 Wind Farm

Given both farms came off at roughly the same time, and a general curiosity about the cause of the failure and the repair process, we set ourselves up some alerts via the ‘Notifications’ widget in ez2view to look for a restart of operations at both wind farms.

That alert triggered this morning at 09:31 (NEM time) on Friday 7th February 2025:

… i.e. meaning that the ramp occurred in the 5-minute period from 09:25 to 09:30 and was measured in FinalMW for 09:30.

Opening up the ‘Bids & Offers’ widget in ez2view we take a quick look at the past 7 days onsite for this wind farm:

In our first article we captured the first rebid shown in the table above (i.e. the one with Rebid Reason still saying ‘Initial Bid’) … so we see that there have been six subsequent rebids since that time, each talking about changes in outage schedule (which is totally understandable, given the complexity of what’s gone on).

A couple other questions ….

Whilst posting this article, here’s a couple other things I’ll flag here that are questions in my mind.  Grateful for input from people who know more than I do!

Was the failure at Berrybank 2 Wind Farm?

Both farms came off at roughly the same time (Berrybank 2 slightly before Berrybank 1) – and now Berrybank 1 has returned to service before Berrybank 2.

1)  This supports our supposition that the failure occurred at Berrybank 2 rather than Berrybank 1.

2)  The reason why I say ‘our supposition’ is because I’ve not seen (in any of the reporting I have seen) that the specific location of the failure clarified as to which of the wind farms suffered the failure:

(a)  For instance, I can’t see anything currently on the GPG Media Page (nor here on LinkedIn), nor on the Naturgy Media Page.

(b)  So I’m working on the current hypothesis (note this is speculation!) that is:

i.  The failure was at Berrybank 2,

ii.  Both plant were taken offline as a result

…  first and foremost for safety reasons,

… but also (presumably) to allow for some form of initial visual inspection.

iii.  Given the Berrybank 1 is now restarted, I’m presuming the initial inspection* is done

…  and that this confirmed enough to afford confidence that Berrybank 1 can restart,

… whilst the focus is on understanding cause-of-failure at Berrybank 2 (which might be off for longer as a result … so we’ll continue to watch for that alert via the ‘Notifications’ widget in ez2view).

* I wonder how the visual inspection was done so quickly?  Seems unlikely a crane could be used as quickly as that (so perhaps drone – or perhaps something else??)

(c)  Somewhere in my reading I did see some comment somewhere that the affected Wind Farm was 2 years old … so reaching for the ‘hot off the press’ GSD2024 we take a quick comparison of ‘A’ Pages to confirm that Berrybank 2 is 2 years old:

So if someone knows something reporting which of the farms was the one actually affected, it would be appreciated if you could add that in as a comment below, please?

What was the cause of the failure?

Like many others, I’ll look forward with interest to understanding what the cause of the failure was – but I did see that Giles had noted in his article that lightning might have been a factor (and also that this had been appended to the article title after I’d initially linked to it here):

Giles’ article notes further down that:

‘Vestas, which made the turbines, is looking at the possibility of a major lighting strike. Suggestions on mainstream media that the turbine had been vulnerable and weakened because it was not operating have been dismissed.’

When I saw that in Giles’ update I wondered how lightning might cause such a failure … with the (decades long rust affected) mechanical engineering mindset kicking in.  In Giles article the image cuts off just below the bit of the turbine tower that shows the failure, but in the image in the ABC article here just shows the top.

The thing that struck me when I saw that was how neatly horizontal it was, which made me wonder if it was not some kind of weld failure, possibly triggered by high wind speeds delivering torsional stress on a defective joint?  But again that’s speculation on my part at this point (and I stress I am very rusty as an engineer and have never worked on construction at a wind farm).

So, suffice to say, I will be interested to learn more when the real experts weigh in!