Talk:List of hydroelectric power station failures

Intended to be a list
This is intended to be a list of dams which have suddenly lost the ability to generate. The list Dam failures does not list generation capacity and is more concerned with the actual failure of the dam itself. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Engineman (talk • contribs) 14:21, 23 October 2010 (UTC)


 * To tally with the above intention of the article's creator Engineman, I will now move this page to List of hydroelectric power station failures. Kind regards. Reh  man  00:17, 26 October 2010 (UTC)
 * I have some terrible news for you; at some point, every hydroelectric plant trips off the line and stops generating, even if only for minutes. Are you going to overlay this list with List of hydroelectric power stations? What's the criterion for being on *this* list? --Wtshymanski (talk) 14:25, 22 December 2010 (UTC)
 * I of course have no idea on the intentions of creating this list; just fixed the title sometime back... Probably list as "failures longer than 30mins (or etc)"? Reh  man  01:39, 23 December 2010 (UTC)
 * If no one has any idea what this list is for, it should be deleted. --Wtshymanski (talk) 03:36, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

This is intended to be a list of dams which have suddenly lost the ability to generate. The list Dam failures does not list generation capacity and is more concerned with the actual failure of the dam itself. I think the introductory paragraph to the list s now pretty clear what the list is about. Engineman (talk) 10:28, 23 December 2010 (UTC)
 * You may also want to participate at here. Reh  man  12:06, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

Turbine failure or poor management decisions?
It seems to me that the turbine failure at Sayano-Shushenskaya Dam was caused by poor management decisions to continue use of Turbine 2 without regard to the excessive vibration history. The entry on the List of hydroelectric power station failures, says "due to turbine failure" but if turbine 2 was not used, it would not have failed. The section on Turbine 2 at 2009 Sayano-Shushenskaya hydro accident shows how management took risks with this turbine, leading to an astonishing catastrophic failure of the turbine and very substantial damage to the dam. There are doubts about the continuing risks of a catastrophic dam failure as a result of the damage caused by the turbine failure.--DThomsen8 (talk) 13:36, 4 March 2012 (UTC)
 * This is just a list, not a report of the investigations. Any citations referring to opinions on the cause of the S-S disaster should be included in that article, not here. --Wtshymanski (talk) 15:43, 4 March 2012 (UTC)

Dartmouth Dam, Victoria, Australia
A 180MW Francis turbine-generator running at full speed was instantaneously stopped by a foreign body left in the penstock following maintenance. The installation shifted about 2m within the base of the 180m high earth and rockfill gravity dam wall of the 3,906GL reservoir. After initial consternation regarding the integrity of the wall (declared safe after lengthy assessment), the hydro installation was repaired/replaced but was off-line for several years. A breach of the wall would have obliterated only a couple of small towns and a sparsely settled agricultural area in the relatively narrow 120km Mitta Mitta valley below the dam, but more significantly, would have resulted in the over-topping and probable failure of the earthen walls of the 40m high 3,038GL Hume Weir, 200km downstream on the Murray River. This is immediately upstream of the regional cities of Albury and Wodonga and a much more intensively settled irrigation area, and consequences would have been disastrous. Trebla2 (talk) 14:09, 13 March 2012 (UTC)


 * And? Citation? If we list every time a bearing wipes at a hydro plant, this is going to be a very long list. --Wtshymanski (talk) 16:21, 13 March 2012 (UTC)
 * It was a bit more substantial than a bearing 'wipe'. It destroyed the facility. veeblefetzer (talk) 14:11, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

The consequences of instantaneous deceleration of a turbine with major angular momentum may go way beyond the immediate loss of generation capacity, including reservoir breach and significant destruction of national grid infrastructure downstream and remote to the site of failure, which would make the lights blink. If the list is not intended to be comprehensive, perhaps it would be better deleted, and I take your point that the reason for having the list is not defined. My take was that it was to illustrate dangers and deficiencies in past and present hydro technologies. Integration into the structure of, or even close coupling to the dam, of turbines without some kind of fail-safe decoupling and buffering mechanism appears to be a significant problem, and in view of your implication that failures resulting in self-destruction of these installations are common, they would seem to be worthy of inclusion.

ps citation for the above event: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_Dam

Please let me know if I am using this "talk" page incorrectly or inappropriately.

Trebla2 (talk) 00:14, 15 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Did this failure cause a major outage? Doesn't seem likely - 180 MW units on the Australian grid probably get started and stopped a couple of times a day. --Wtshymanski (talk) 13:38, 15 March 2012 (UTC)
 * I live near the Dartmouth. No, it did not cause an outage. Hydro accounts for a small percentage (<10%) of the entire eastern seaboard grid. The Dartmouth turbine is the largest of it's kind in Australia but still accounts for less than 5% of all hydro. It was a blip.  veeblefetzer (talk) 14:11, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

Bad criteria
Most of these incidents didn't cause wide-spread power failures, in spite of "this list is concerned with severe and abnormal power outages which caused major power failures due to damage to the hydro site itself or its connections. " Guaranteed losing 5 megawatts at the Ruhr dam didn't make the lights blink in Germany, and the Grand Rapids head cover failure didn't make anything blink except Manitoba Hydro's sales figures for the year. I propose any hydro station failures that didn't cause a notable, cited, power outage be removed. --Wtshymanski (talk) 16:31, 13 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Seems pretty reasonable. Pirate Argh!!1!  11:21, 16 March 2012 (UTC)

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Swastika
When someone posts this link, it comes up with a picture of the Swastika, which is the first image on the page. Although it seems to be somewhat blurry, is it possible to choose a different image? 2601:14A:503:2E00:ACEA:2027:9D8D:3E6C (talk) 12:32, 6 February 2020 (UTC) [ileanadu - can't sign in, can't reset password]