De-Icing Wind Turbine Blades

Folly on top of folly

photos and excerpts gleaned from wind power engineering article of Oct. 25, 2018, which I didn’t discover until December 2024 - please leave a comment if you have update info

“After experiencing significant wind-farm downtime due to ice buildup on turbine blades, the operators of the 150-turbine Lac Alfred wind farm, near Amqui, Quebec, sought new ideas for retrofitting the blades with an anti-icing technology. They turned to Wicetect OY’s patented Ice Prevention System (WIPS).”

“The WIPS blade-heating elements consist of carbon-based electrical heaters, which let the blade surface heat quickly — but to a controlled temperature — once ice is detected. The thin (0.5 mm) heater, including a glass fabric protection layer, does not interfere with the unit’s aerodynamics.

However, the biggest challenge was retrofitting an efficient de-icing system on existing, four-year-old wind turbines, according to Sebastien Goupil-Dumont, manager – Generation at EDF Renewable Energy Inc. EDF RE acted as project manager.

“To ensure a high-quality end product, it was decided that the blade work had to be done on the ground, in a remote location, instead of trying to do all of it up tower, using platforms,” explains Goupil-Dumont. So far the retrofit, though costly, is producing positive results.”

It would be interesting to know how much labor and energy was used to remove the blades, transport them to a place where they could be coated, then transported back, and re-installed. (It takes a very large crane to lift those ~ 40 ton blades* and a very large truck to transport them.) *that may be for all 3 blades; not sure

All this should be added to any cost analysis of wind plantations, especially in northern latitudes with frequently freezing temps - although there was that big outage clear down in Texas in 2022…

“Icing is a never-ending subject and we work hard every summer to improve and get ready for the next winter,”

“Like Lac Alfred, the 33-turbine Caribou Wind Farm in New Brunswick, Canada, is also testing Wicetec’s WIPS technology.”

“One manufacturer supplied Caribou with six prototype blades outfitted with a heated blade system that uses hot air — the only such blades in the world, according to site mgr Mark Hachey. However, without significant icing conditions for a couple of years, the testing was inconclusive. In addition, the technology would have required Caribou to replace 99 blades at a cost in the tens of millions of dollars.”

It’s not just the extra cost of the heated blades - how much energy would be diverted from the wind turbine’s productivity in order to heat the blades?

Caribou has tried several other de-icing options, including electrically heated tiles, painting portions of the blades with black paint to absorb UV energy, a coating applied by helicopter, and a complicated R&D product. Results ranged from impractical to inefficient and costly.

It seems obvious to me that the energy used by spraying de-icing agent from helicopters might greatly increase the cost of the energy to be derived from the wind turbines.

“You can only swallow so much loss,” says Caribou’s Hachey, who knows firsthand the downside of downtime.”

Yes, the downside of downtime is what wind energy is all about - especially the downtime resulting from windless days. We’d be much better off with coal, gas, or nuclear power plants.