When a wind turbine caught light within the municipality of Lújar, the Motril fire service were called out to deal with it, along with an Infoca unit.

This wind farm overlooks Motril (Conjuro) and is right next to an oak forest, so there was quite some concern that it could spread. It was in 2015 that Lújar and the surrounding area suffered a major forest fire and lost a considerable number of oak and carob trees. In total, it consumed 2,147 hectares, 1,580 of which was woodland.

The fire services present were there more to stop it spreading than to put the generator fire out, given the height that these structures stand at. The fire deployment stood guard until it finally burnt out.

The emergency coordination centre 112 received an alert around 08.25h yesterday morning from somebody who saw smoke coming out of the generator compartment.

Editorial comment: having benefitted from an interesting Youtube programme on these structures, I gleened that there are basically two types of wind turbines; those with gears and those with multiple pole generators.

The problem that needs to be solved is that the rotation of the props is far slower than the double-polar generator needs to turn out 60 hertzs, which has to be delivered constantly and cannot even be allowed to drop down to 59 hertzs for example, so the first wind turbines had a huge gear boxes fitted inside weighing thousands of kilos, to increase the rotation speed up to what the double-polar generator needs.

The trouble is, these gearboxes are under such strain that they often break down and burn out. So…, the solution was to remove the gearbox and to connect up to a multiple set of poles. This result in far fewer burn outs, but keeping the revolutions at the exact speed to produce exactly 60 hertz remains a problem. OK, that’s over simplified and roughly what I can remember but some of our readers will surely be able to provide a better breakdown and correct any of my errors.

(News: Lugar, Costa Tropical, Granada, Andalucia)