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Satellite outage knocks out thousands of Enercon's wind turbines

reuters.com

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Re: Satellite outage knocks out thousands of Enercon's wind turbines

#11

Post by olliej »

warmwaffles wrote: post #7
olliej wrote: post #4

I’m kind of confused, the headline says they’re out of operation, the article says they’re in auto mode. My understanding (prior to this article) was that turbines normally ran autonomously anyway, so is this “they’re generating power in automatic mode”, or they’ve gone to some kind of automatic safe-mode? (I do know that just turning it off/applying brakes is insufficient for a general “safe” mode, but that’s at “I…

I'm also confused as to why there is no communication cable like a fiber optic line to each one of these turbines along with the power cables. Am I missing something?

I'm guessing it's because someone said (reasonably) "we need to be able to manage these turbines if a line is taken out", so they went "ok, lets add radio/satellite or something". The next thing you do is go "we have that connection, why are we paying huge amounts of money on cable for data when we already have a radio?"

Re: Satellite outage knocks out thousands of Enercon's wind turbines

#13

Post by Nextgrid »

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #6
Nextgrid wrote: post #2

I wonder why they use satellite. Wind turbines are high up so it seems like a very good candidate for point-to-point line-of-sight microwave links.

I wonder why the use 'radio' at all, since they need a cable anyway. Too cheap to have tossed a fiber along it?

I feel stupid for not even thinking about it but you're absolutely correct.

Re: Satellite outage knocks out thousands of Enercon's wind turbines

#14

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

Nextgrid wrote: post #13
LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder why the use 'radio' at all, since they need a cable anyway. Too cheap to have tossed a fiber along it?

I feel stupid for not even thinking about it but you're absolutely correct.

I've meanwhile read that they are networked very well, with fibre even, but only between each other when built in a park/farm. And often very remote, far from other inftastructure. The problem arises at the transfer/injection point from the utitility one level up. Not always, but sometimes, and in different ways. It can happen that there is no 3/4g at all there. It can happen that the other utility isn't networked(in a usable way). It can happen that the other utility doesn't want to network for whichever reasons, security, etc. And it can happen that you get 1Gb/s symmetrical there.

Apparently Enercon choose to offer its clients this solution as 'carefree package', to spare them the regulatory/bureaurocratic hassle of having to deal with this.

Re: Satellite outage knocks out thousands of Enercon's wind turbines

#15

Post by aWRr »

Nextgrid wrote: post #2

I wonder why they use satellite. Wind turbines are high up so it seems like a very good candidate for point-to-point line-of-sight microwave links.

Well yeah and they are hardwired to at least one physically wired network: the energy grid. Why they don't have decent cabled inter/intranet is beyond me.

I don't think satellite internet is that much cheaper but, I might be wrong. I am no network engineer. Anyone who CAN comment on that?

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