# Grounding a small wind turbine



## 333sol42 (Dec 17, 2008)

I work for a wind energy company and a maintenance issue with some of our older small turbines has come up. I figured an electrician forum would be a good place to get some feedback on one of our potential solutions.

We are finding that the grounding wire at the base of the tower and the anchor points is being broken due to repetitive sway of the tower (a natural in design thing for a guy lattuce tower to do). We have thought about using a "flexible cable" type wire to connect the tower to the grounding rods. 

Does anybody have any experience with this type of cable? Would you recommend using it for our grounding application? The flexible cables, they are more flexible than regular copper ground wire correct (presumably that would make them more tolerant of these conditions)? Any other potential solutions.


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## RePhase277 (Feb 5, 2008)

Being a wind energy company, surely you have an engineer on staff what does he think?:jester:

How about a braided copper cable?


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## gilbequick (Oct 6, 2007)

What size ground wire are you using? If you're talking about regular stranded THHN wire the bigger stuff is pretty darn thick and hard to bend. I would look into as stated above more of a braided wire that's designed to be flexed repetitively.


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## TheRick (Apr 13, 2008)

Check these out;

http://www.stormcopper.com/Flexible-Electrical-Bus-Bar-Connectors.htm

We have used them before in high vibration applications (crushing mill). I was not involved with the purchasing so I can't speak for the price, but the functionality was perfect!


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## 333sol42 (Dec 17, 2008)

*Great! thanks for the responces*

We don't staff engineers, manufacturers provide some level of engineering and then we contract a very good engineer. But wouldn't trouble him with these types of questions, just submit final designs for his review and approval.

We do have a lot of savvy folks here...

anyway, we use stranded copper 2 ought. I will suggest braided, and look into this link. One issue is that we want to start cadwelding our ground connections, so, the choice has to fit that niche too. That's an issue to talk to the cadweld people about, but i figured i would throw that out there.

thanks for you responses, I will look into this more later today.


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