10kW Wind Turbine 0, Storm 2

Twice in one-and-a-half years.

A mammoth windstorm during Saturday night on February 12th, 2011 has once again "fried" Power One's 6kW inverters, only this time both inverters were affected.  At bedtime, I noticed windspeed was 58 kph as recorded on the residence's Bios weather station.

Last year's mid-May storm affected only one of our two parallel-wired inverters.  This time it's both.

Energy West's Paul Wende on Monday logged onto the controller software via his laptop.
He checked settings and advised that all were within safe operating ranges, but since the controller of the 10 kW wind turbine has no built-in memory, no record exists of the voltage and RPMs of the turbine.
Controller hardware appeared to be physically unaffected by the night's events.

Paul removed the two Aurora inverter covers and announced both inverters "fried".

Paul Wende investigates

A lot of "soot" inside the second inverter

More "soot" inside the first inverter

Inverters were packed into boxes for return to Power One in California, where an investigation will show inverter logs of the last voltages received.  After inverter damage in May of 2010, a new inverter took two months to arrive, its last log indicated maximum voltages had NOT been exceeded!  The two-month timeframe will likely be repeated in this case.

That wasn't the only damage that night.
The new nets and poles at the golf course's west fenceline were still standing, but a hardware bolt--holding the aircraft cable on Pole 3--broke, allowing the cable and net to droop.  Advanced Powerline of Kelowna was called and, five minutes later, their crew drove into the driveway.  A crew member chuckled at my stunned look, "we weren't far away when we got the call from the office!"

Jeff, plus two colleagues on the ground, raised the cable.

"Haven't seen one of those hardware pieces break recently, but they did get some bad ones a couple of years ago."  He added, "Maybe you got one of those."

"Have you got a couple of inverters in your office we could borrow?" suggests Kia.