Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [125]
Walking the barren land on a beautiful warm day, Hermann inspected the machines to see if they were, in fact, the promised Five-Cent Dream Machine. What he saw caused him to send out a note to his investment clients that basically screamed, “Sell! Sell!” The ground was littered with blades and cracks near where the blades attached to the hub were clearly visible. Sixteen of the seventy-two turbines (22 percent) were not operating, even though the wind was blowing at speeds that reached fifteen miles per hour. It was not a pretty scene. In an August 22 note, he wrote,
Admittedly, it is possible the Buffalo Ridge availability factor at the time of the visit was an aberration. However, while standing on the road by some of the operating wind turbines, the loud groaning, clanging, whining noises emitting from several of the machines strongly suggested to my untrained unscientific ear that meaningful problems may exist with some of these machines.50
Kenetech hit back at Hermann immediately, citing his affiliation as a consultant with New World Power Company, a competitor. Their responses only bought them a little more time.51
Then, Windpower Monthly, a leading trade magazine, put out an extensive feature detailing problems with the new turbine in its September issue. It put the 33M-VS troubles Hermann saw in perspective. One of Kenetech’s suppliers confirmed trouble with at least one component, the hydraulic boxes. Eyewitness reports from a Palm Springs wind farm found the situation there comparable to what Hermann had reported from Buffalo Ridge. “Talk throughout the wind industry was of most of the 33M-VS blades in Palm Springs being cracked or damaged, of times when most 33M-VS turbines in Palm Springs were apparently shut down when the wind reaches about 35 mph,” the trade magazine wrote.
Kenetech maintained that any problems were just normal launch issues, but that didn’t jibe with what the company had been saying for years about the fabulous new machine. The 33M-VS was supposed to be less prone to failures thanks to its variable-speed rotor, and yet nearly every piece of the turbine was falling apart. “They’ve done just about every major component and I don’t see that as a teething problem,” said an anonymous wind expert quoted by Windpower Monthly. “You might have technical problems, glitches or control problems, but you don’t have blades coming apart at the seams or losing whole generators.”52
A different anonymous source noted with a hint of snark, “If you spend $69 million on developing this cosmic technology, you shouldn’t have these problems.”53
The 33M-VS, eventually renamed the KVS-33, obviously never competed with fossil fuels. Years later, wind industry insiders were still referring to the “Kenetech fiasco.”54 Wind electricity prices, on average, did not drop below the magic five-cent threshold until 2002.
But maybe hitting that threshold wasn’t nearly as important as the company made it seem in order to differentiate its product. Electricity markets and wind farm construction were considerably more complicated than Kenetech made it seem. Regardless, wind power companies started to become profitable several years before that.55 Turbines weren’t everything, even if they were the sexiest part of the industry.
The mechanical problems probably sealed Kenetech’s fate, but the company also encountered stiff resistance from environmentalists who argued that they knowingly installed turbines that would kill federally protected birds in Altamont Pass. In retrospect, in regard to the local habitat, the pass was one of the worst places to site a wind farm. Although Altamont turbines killed thousands of birds in its early years, other wind farms, even the other early California areas, have shown much, much lower death rates.56
Further, persistent concerns about the aesthetic impact of wind turbines exacerbated the public relations