Whether it happens in the "wee hours" or the middle of the day, if anything goes wrong with a wind turbine, it'll shut itself down immediately and send an alert to a wind technician, says Kevin Carswell, the operations manager at Canadian Hydro Developers Cowley Ridge installation in Alberta.

The Melancthon 1 wind farm has the same "fail safe" systems as Cowley, and the operations organization is similar.

At Melancthon, the office of CHD is staffed with Melancthon 2 in mind. At noon last Saturday, possibly four of the turbines were not in operation but there appeared to be technicians on duty at two of those non-working sites.

"Each turbine has a stand-alone computer system. It would automatically shut itself down into a safe state (and) email or cell-phone an alarm (to the office or on-call technician," said Mr. Carswell in a telephone interview from the Cowley site.

"Most of the time, it's something that can be reset from a (remote) computer, and restarted safely. If it's an alarm that needs attending, the turbine would be locked down."

Mr. Carswell said the technicians wouldn't go to the turbine after dark, but would simply ensure that it had been shut down. However, they would respond 24 hours a day "to some emergency calls."

He said the best example would be if the main substation developed a fault, in which case the entire system would automatically shut down. This would require immediate attendance at the substation.

Mr. Carswell has been the operations manager at CHD's Cowley Ridge since January 2005. Cowley, he said, is southern Alberta's, and maybe Canada's, first wind farm.

CHD purchased that farm in 1996, when it had 66 Kenetech turbines with a capacity of 375 kilowatts each, or about one-quarter the capacity of the turbines at Melancthon. Since 1996, CHD has installed 20 Nordec turbines with 1.3 megawatts each, or almost as much as the 1.5-MW turbines at Melancthon.

Because of the age, design and number of the turbines at Cowley, "we typically respond to one a day on the older ones." Usually, he said, the problems are minor, such as oil level.

"The older ones require a bit more TLC."

There aren't as many turbines at Melancthon yet, but the CHD office has been designed with both phases of that installation in mind, thus it will have generally the same staffing as Cowley, where there are six technicians, one office manager, and one operations manager who oversees the operations and maintenance.

All the turbines are designed "for a certain lifespan." Although the literature indicates the average life of the new turbines would be about 30 years, Mr. Carswell said the practical span is considered to be 20. He suspected that has something to do with the length of contracts to supply electricity, as well as the terms of finance. Mr. Carswell was not

prepared to speculate on how the new-style turbines at Melancthon would be repowered at the end of 20 years - whether they would be rebuilt from the ground up or whether it would simply be a case of replacing the top portion; the gearbox and generator.

However, in the case of the old towers at Cowley,

he said it would likely be a case of replacing the turbines from the ground up - possibly to replace the old towers with the tubular steel ones as at Melancthon.

The original 66 turbines at Cowley, the Kenetech, are just 24.5 metres high, with 15metre blades. The newer ones at that

location are 46 metres high, with 29-metre blades.

Inside each of the new towers there is a ladder for access to the working part of the turbine - the housing atop that contains the gearbox and generator. Technicians can

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