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Winter weather: Bumblebee photos of Texas cities covered in snow
A record-breaking winter storm continues to pour snow over the state of Texas.
Staff Video, USA TODAY
The claim: Wind power companies use helicopters and chemical spraying to remove wind turbines
Millions of Texans are without power after a winter storm brought unprecedented temperatures into the region this week. Many social media users have blamed wind turbines inaccurately. One such report is incorrect to characterize an old photograph of a Swiss procedure for finishing windmills to question the sustainability of wind power.
“A helicopter running on fossil fuels, which sprays a chemical made from fossil fuels on a wind turbine made with fossil fuels during an ice storm, is amazing,” reads an image posted on Instagram on February 16. .
The image, which appears to be a screenshot of a tweet, contains a photo of a helicopter and frozen wind turbine. The helicopter carries a barrel and sprays liquid on the wind turbine.
The tweet was shared by leading Texas oil and gas consultant Luke Legate. After getting over 30,000 retweets and 89,000 likes, Legate made his tweets private.
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The Instagram user @pilotstuff posted the picture and claimed with the caption: “Useless, waste of land, bird killing, subsidized, beaks and blinkers.”
Other Facebook users have posted the same image and misleading allegation.
Image of the Swiss helicopter company – no chemicals were used
The image comes from the Swiss company Alpine Helicopter.
Alpine Helicopter presented the image in 2015 for the Winterwind International Wind Energy Conference. According to a submission, Alpine started testing the helicopter hot water method in 2013.
Alpine stressed that the procedure does not use chemicals.
The same image appears in a 2015 article in the Norwegian publication TU Media. The article explains that the helicopter uses hot water jets to melt ice on Swedish windmills.
Helicopter operators use a joystick to spray hot water on turbines to thaw ice or snow collected on them to prevent dangerous precipitation and obstruction of wind turbines. In preparation, water is heated the night before in a tank with a 260 kV oil burner. The procedure then takes about 90 minutes to ice off a wind turbine.
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This hot water defrosting strategy is used for wind turbines that do not have an internal defrosting system, or for wind turbines that do not have adequate defrosting systems.
“No chemicals are added to the water, unlike aircraft mining, which often involves extensive use of chemicals,” the article reads.
Social media users have been criticizing this image over the past few years over the use of fossil fuels to remove it.
Australian Sustainability Publication Renew Economy has calculated that a wind turbine can repay the helicopter emissions of fossil fuels used to deis a turbine with 22 minutes of strong wind.
Wind turbines account for a fraction of Texas outages
Daniel Cohan, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University, told the U.S. that frozen wind turbines were not to blame for Texas’ current outage.
Cohan explained that power operators plan to vary demand and capacity during the year because they know that wind has a lower capacity at certain times. Failure of gas, coal and nuclear power to contribute the expected greatest amount of power required caused the disruptions.
The Texas Electric Reliability Board is the non-profit organization that manages the Texas power grid. According to ERCOT data, wind in January accounted for 25% of the energy in Texas. Throughout 2020, it met about 23% of Texas’ energy needs.
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Fossil fuels used in windmill construction
The post correctly says that fossil fuels are used to construct wind turbines. Vehicles and construction equipment operating on petrol are used to transport supplies to the construction site and build the structure. Fossil fuels also help to collect materials and make the necessities needed to build a wind turbine. Steel, for example, is produced in a coal-fired and natural gas-fired furnace.
According to IEEE Spectrum, a magazine for the IEEE Professional Association of Engineers, once built, a functioning wind turbine can generate enough power in less than a year to offset the emissions used to build it. . Although wind power is not exempt from emissions and independent of fossil fuels, wind farms produce much less net emissions than the traditional generation of fossil fuels.
Our rating: partially false
We judge the claim that wind power companies used fossil fuel sprays to deis turbines, PARTIALLY FALSE because some of them were not supported by our research. Reports falsely claim that the viral image shows a helicopter spraying chemicals onto windmills de-ice. The photo is of a Swiss helicopter company using hot water to melt ice on wind turbines. It is true that construction and maintenance of wind turbines use fossil fuels, but the emissions are minimal compared to the emissions that are compensated over time by operating wind turbines.
Our sources for fact checking:
- USA TODAY, February 16, ” Massive failure ‘: why are millions of people in Texas still without power? “
- USA TODAY, February 17, “Fact Check: Frozen Wind Turbines Do Not Deserve All the Blame for Texas Failures”
- Luke Legate, accessed 18 February, Linkedin profile
- Wayback Machine, Luke Legate, February 14, archived tweet
- Alpine Helicopter, Winterwind International Wind Energy Conference, has access to ‘wind solution for wind turbines’ on 18 February.
- TU Media, 1 Feb 2015, “New method to remove dangerous ice on wind turbines.”
- Renew Economy, February 1, 2016, “Why cleantech inspires new wrongdoing”
- Electric Reliability Council of Texas, Visits February 18, “About ERCOT”
- Electric Reliability Council of Texas, Visited February 18, “Generation”
- IEEE Spectrum, 29 February 2016, “To get wind power, you need oil”
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Our fact-checking work is supported in part by a grant from Facebook.