Big Wind Turbine Failures

Watching a big wind turbine flying apart is spectacular. Even seeing still photos of the aftermath of a catastrophic failure, such as the one shown here, is pretty fascinating, in a train-wreck sort of way. The picture was taken in Searsburg, Vermont, at the only industrial-scale wind farm in the state, which produces about 12 million kilowatts annually. According to the Industrial Wind Action Group, "one of the blades came in contact with the turbine's tower causing it to buckle during high winds." It isn't clear from that whether the blade "came in contact" with the tower before or after it broke off from the hub this past September 15. It's been suggested that the failed blade had been previously repaired after a lighting strike, which may have left it in a weakened condition. Whatever. It's not the first failure of this sort, and it won't be the last. The first wind turbine in Vermont, installed in the early '40s in Hubbardton, similarly failed in 1945. These things are bound to happen. Everything falls apart. The Caithness Windfarm Information Forum, which tracks wind turbine accident data worldwide, offers the following statistics on the number of annual incidents: Manufacturers of these big wind systems generally recommend a safety zone of over a thousand feet from things like buildings and roadways. It's a good idea, and just common sense — a 2006 failure in Germany saw a blade thrown over 650 feet from a 325-foot tower. An article that ran in Business Week last year underscores the importance of safety zones.

In addition to one industrial sized wind farm, Vermont has one nuclear power plant (Vermont Yankee, 540 megawatts), which is less than ten miles from where I write. Beset with and bedeviled by a chain of so-far non-lethal events — missing fuel rods, malfunctioning valves, cracks in the steam dryer, fires in the transformer station, accidental releases, a partial collapse of one of its cooling towers, and more — I'm a lot more comfortable with multiple catastrophic failures of wind turbines than a single catastrophic failure of a nuclear power facility. As a footnote, here's a video of Hermann Scheer — member of the German Parliament, president of the European Association for Renewable Energy, and general chairman of the World Council for Renewable Energy — speaking at the 7th World Wind Energy Conference & Exhibition Community Power in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, this past June, about his position that the global energy problem must be solved entirely with renewable energy.