by David Wojick
On July 26, CFACT’s President Craig Rucker sent Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin a letter warning him about the serious risk of blade failure in the giant offshore wind facility being built off Virginia. The warning builds on the recent blade failure off of Nantucket, which has littered the beaches with fiberglass fragments. Virginia is also at risk.
In this article, I present some technical background on that risk. The facility will be one of the world’s biggest, with 176 enormous turbines. It is just getting started with pile driving, so no turbine blades have been installed to date. This is an opportune time to undertake caution.
The Nantucket turbines are made by GE, and they are the world’s largest in operation today at 13 MW, each driven by three huge 107-meter-long blades. That is 351 feet for those of us who do not speak metric. The Virginia turbines will be even bigger at 14 MW with 108 meters (154+ feet) long. They are made by Siemens Gamesa, or SG for short.
The GE turbines and blades have been in production for going on two years, so have some operational experience. The SG turbines and blades just came into production so there is no experience with them. One could say they are being beta tested off Virginia.
This newness in itself is a great concern. At three blades each, there are an incredible 528 blades with a combined length of over 57,000 meters (187,000 feet or 35 miles) of blades. To take first production blades to these huge lengths is surely very risky.
Multiple or even systemic failures are certainly possible. A sound engineering approach would be to build a few and see how they did over time. Note, too, that the prototypes were in Europe, so these blades have never been tested in a hurricane, which offshore Virginia is prone to get.
Now let’s look at the blade stress physics just a bit, as it is amazing. SG has a quick look on their website, saying this:
“The rotational forces found in offshore wind turbines in operation put IMMENSE STRAIN ON THE BLADES and the rest of the wind turbine structure. (Emphasis added) At a tip speed of approximately 90 meters per second – equivalent to 324 kilometers per hour! (201 mph!) – and a projected lifetime of more than 25 years, high-quality and innovative design is imperative. For a 108-meter-long blade, the rotational forces are around a staggering 80 million newton meters, and the strain on the blades and the structure is intense! To put this into perspective, the force pulling on a human shoulder while spinning a 1 kg object around in an outstretched arm is only about 10 newton meters!”
(80 million newton meters is about 59 million pound-feet of torque).
Given these immense, intense strains, the novelty of the SG blades becomes even more of an issue.
To begin with, they are constructed in an unusual way. GE and other major manufacturers build half a lengthwise blade at a time, then glue the two halves together. Building half a tube is relatively simple, just lining a trough-like mold with fiberglass. Gravity is your friend, and inspection is easy.
In contrast, SG builds the entire tubular blade at once. I have no idea how, but it cannot be simple. Gravity wants to distort the tube, and inspection must be difficult. In addition, while SG has built a lot of smaller blades this full tube way, their giant blades are of a different composition. Because of the extreme stresses, they have added carbon fibers.
In summary, we have a newly huge blade, subject to immense stresses, made for the first time in an unusual way with a new composition and never tested in a hurricane. The high novelty risk to Virginia is obvious.
But there is another big risk issue as well, a business issue if you like. SG no longer exists as a corporation. It was absorbed by its majority stockholder to keep it from going under. The reason, as Reuters puts it, is “quality issues and ramp-up problems caused a 4.6 billion euro (5 billion dollar) annual net loss.”
In Virginia, we are looking at the biggest wind turbine ramp-up in history, where high quality is imperative. One has to wonder if SG is capable of this prodigious task at this time, and that wonder signals a big risk. Not only does SG have a deep history of problems, they are undergoing restructuring.
Given these novelty-laden circumstances, it surely is unwise to try to throw up 35 miles of untested blades without further consideration. Hence Craig Rucker’s letter to Governor Youngkin.
Image Idaho National Laboratory Creative Commons
Save the whales! And the birds, and the economy.
Good article, good points. That Vineyard Wind blade failure, as bad as it was for the beaches, came at the right time to raise urgent and important questions about the design criteria and design basis for offshore wind. I don’t see any good reason for confidence to proceed. It’s bad enough that onshore wind turbines obviously cannot withstand a tornado strike. Why in the world would these even bigger turbines be installed at sea?
Because people stupid enough to promote wind and solar will not stop being stupid. And because government keeps subsidizing and supporting it.
Once the magic money machine with the initials U.S. starts throwing money at something, it won’t stop until the voters wise up and revolt.
Intermittency should have put a stop to this bullshit before the first “wind farm” or “solar farm” was ever built. But we don’t have our best and brightest leading us anymore, not for a long time.
“Intermittency should have put a stop to this…” Absolutely agree on this point. And the engineering societies, system operators, and utility companies should have pushed back at the very beginning. But noooo, they are all just going with the flow (of wrong-headed policy and of the money.)
The IEEE is certainly complicit in the fraud.
+100 – why did the utilities buy into that crap?!?
Non-CO2 emitting power is required by law in Virginia via the Virginia Clean Economy Act. That was passed when the democrats had control of both houses and the governorship. Plus, the local utility wanted to build wind power so it would get the return on investment instead of an outside entity coming and building it themselves and sending the electric consumers the bill.
This crap is the same as jab or no job.
In that case it was the medicos who violated their Hippocratic oath.
With renewables, it’s the engineering professionals violating their licenses.
Nice utility ya got there, be a shame if anything bad happened to it…
Most of the US voters support the so-called “Climate Change” agenda according to polls. The Congress approved it.
So propaganda is effective. But why are the politicians and utilities and experts lying to us?
It really is like some kind of green cult and they just can’t accept that wind turbines don’t belong on the grid except in some special, remote cases and where storage is affordable.
The consequences of this type of failure seem pretty small.
Fiberglass on the beach is an annoyance, but hardly the end of the world.
CFACT should not be a boy crying wolf. There are hundreds of negative impacts of wind farms, but broken blades on beaches does not even make the first 20.
True, but it gets the attention of the public- more so than obscure economic analysis.
Not contradicting you, but hundreds of negative impacts that you’re concerned with or the general public is concerned with? I agree with JZ’s comment below (above?). Technical and economic issues are important but nothing is going to change until the attitudes of the general public start to change.
See my comment above, carbon fibre in the aquatic environment is a death sentence to any marine animal ingesting it.
It’s more than an annoyance. It’ll be expensive to clean up and it’ll indicate more failures to come.
It will also of course result in the destruction of immensely expensive structures: follow the money, as they say!
And you will never know if the clean-up is complete.
Playing in sand filled with fibreglass flakes.
Have Fun. !!
Quite true but with one blade already failing off Nantucket in less than a year of operation they’re going ahead sticking them on the next 44 of the planned 66 turbines. Presumably that’s because consumers will need to rely on their power output for a generation of folks. Nothing to see or worry about here folks so move along and enjoy the global cooling.
The impact on tourism might run millions of dollars. I suspect Nantucket is shot for the season. 57 tons of fiberglass can do that. Who wants to go to a beach full of fiberglass right, which is how the word will go out. Plus pictures of people in hazmat suits? Next year might be iffy too. Lawsuits for damages to follow.
Also this stuff coukd kill endangered baleen whales which take in huge gulps of water then filter it out through their baleen mats.
This is a warning. The canary is dead, but hey it is just a canary. Right.
Carbon fibre shards are like glass, they will cause internal bleeding to the marine life and kill them in a horrible way.
See how you feel about that when one of those things hits your “pleasure craft” like a missile.
And how many whales need to be sacrificed so we can chase non-solutions to imaginary problems?!
It’s not so much what lands up on the beach but what is floating and possibly partly submerged. Think of a boat cruising out or in and hitting one of these chunks at speed.
Think of body surfing… and hitting a piece. !
ps , was on life guard duty once, and a friend out riding his board embedded two surfboard fins in his side.. he made it into shore somehow.
We initially thought it might have been a small shark.
Not a pretty sight.. something like 15-20 stiches iirc.
Now imagine hitting unseen shards of resin and fibreglass mix.
Unless of course it’s on your beach. Fiberglass can be pretty nasty. You don’t want to walk on fragments in bare feet.
Shouldn’t be much of a problem. If the oceans are boiling, the sand must be pretty hot, too! So, everyone will be wearing flipflops. /sarc off
“Fiberglass on the beach is an annoyance, but hardly the end of the world.”
Wait till a blade hits your loved one in the head, and see if it’s “hardly the end of the world”.
They shouldn’t be built unless the blades have multiple separate ways of supporting many times the level of stress. The outer shell of fibreglass or carbon fiber over the typical balsa core should be backed up by an internal armature that can also support the stresses of the rotor. That way if the outer shell is damaged in the storm the separate, protected internal support will keep the blade from flying away. And I sure other, much more clever people will figure out other better means of backup too, but that has to happen before anymore are built.
Mebbe we need a construction/material code for renewable thingies to require the normal 2 -3 time over design. But then the subsides would need to increase quite a bit so the whole thing would become more reliable but less affordable.
Sound familiar?
How is micro plastics a huge environmental concern but micro carbon fibre shards aren’t. Carbon fibre shards are like glass so any marine animal ingesting these glass-like shards is condemned to a painful death through internal bleeding.
Says the greenie who complains about plastic waste in the World’s oceans. Hypocrite.
Go hug some pink fiberglass insulation with short sleeves. Give it several good squeezes. Then imagine swimming through it.
Relax, everything is fine. A close inspection of the blades reveals they have Wile E Coyote’s seal of approval, “Acme Wind Turbine Blade Company”.
In defense of Acme – their products were well engineered and high quality. It was the “genius” end user that either did not read the instruction manual or simply misused the product.
The current incarnation of Acme Products is Photosonics. I dealt with them for many years in the field of missile range surveillance – they made large powerful tracking mounts. Way in the distance past Acme made special camera equipment for Hollywood. The whole Acme thing was an inside joke about “genius” end users. Remember, Wiley Coyote’s business card said “Certified Genius”.
Acme seems to have fallen off the face of the earth. I couldn’t find any reference to a real business but I’ve seen old black and white photos of the storefront at Photosonics.
Actually I think it was “Super Genius.”
In the cartoon where he had lines (Bugs Bunny cartoon), he introduced himself as such, complete with said business card. After Bugs thoroughly beats him down for the entire cartoon, he reintroduces himself – “Allow me to introduce myself. My name is MUD.”
To which Bugs adds “And MUD spelled backwards is DUM.” (cue music)
Carrying on in the fine ACME tradition, there is still ACME Laboratories!
Purveyors of fine freeware since 1972.
On the net since 1991 and a strong fan of Wile E. Coyote for decades.
One can apply that to all of the climate syndicate’s nefarious activities.
Acme, in the UK, makes whistles.
Indeed, its Acme ‘Thunderer’ is the official whistle for football [soccer] referees.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Thunderer-Metal-Official-Referee-Whistle/dp/B00EUEHJU6/ref
There’s lines more of the link. . . .
Auto
Many have heard the acronym OJT, meaning “On the Job Training”.
Well, the wind farm industry (both onshore and offshore) has just co-opted the phrase to mean “On the Job Testing” . . . you know, just part of the faster, better, cheaper meme*.
*As has been famously noted: “faster, better, cheaper”—in the practical world you can achieve any combination of two out of the three.
For years as a capital project manager in industry, we understood schedule, quality, and cost in the same way: “Pick two.”
Move fast, break blades.
Kinda like how they test experimental “vaccines” nowadays.
I like the “On the Job Testing” .
I’d give this project ONE out of three – faster, worse and more expensive.
I give “renewables” zero out of three – slower, worse, more expensive.
article says”…108 meters (154+ feet) long.”
A correction is needed. If 107 meters is 351 feet then 108 meters can’t be 154 feet long.
Tech writer translation-interpretation strikes again.
Explained by a simple typo, corrected here:
”…108 meters (
154354+ feet) long.”Yes a typo.
Regardless of typographical (stupid fingers) error, it is longer than a football field.
Just envision that.
Worth noting is the header picture is of a baby blade.
Diameter at hub about 7 feet [~2 metres]
Big boy blades are approaching 20 feet [~6 metres] diameter at the hub.
Auto
The tech writer of the quote decided “torque” had to be changed to “rotational forces”, which is almost meaningless (torque is not force).
One is left wondering where/how the 80 Mn-m is determined, as there will be (variable) torque due to air flow, plus the gravitational torque from the mass of the blade.
A google for “windmill blade construction” has some interesting hits.
https://www.iberdrola.com/sustainability/wind-turbines-blades
From my fiberglass boat building days these blade builds is a mind bending
project. Tanker truck loads of resin sticks in my mind…and thats just for the
plug to build the molds.
No, thanks!
Just watch – some enterprising young dude will turn this activity into a thrill-seekers theme park ride.
Darwin Awards will be provided posthumously of course 🙁
What could go wrong? /sarc
a hurricane destroys the entire wind “farm”?
Nah, that’s about as likely as a hail storm destroying a large solar farm…
https://www.themainewire.com/2024/03/the-destruction-of-a-massive-texas-solar-farm-highlights-the-fragility-of-renewable-energy/
such stories are seldom shown in the MSM- probably the local media but not the national or international
at 14 MW with 108 meters (154+ feet) long.
======
Typo. 354+ ??
Yes typo. Sorry.
Story tip – credit where none is due
The “heat dome” causing scorching temperatures across western Europe and north Africa, and boiling athletes and spectators at the Olympic Games in Paris, would have been impossible without human-caused global heating, a rapid analysis has found.
A rapid analysis? Guess who!
Climate change crashed the Olympics on Tuesday,” said Dr Friederike Otto, a climatologist at Imperial College London and part of the World Weather Attribution group behind the analysis.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/jul/31/extreme-heat-dome-hitting-olympics-impossible-without-global-heating
Its been a lovely day.
Anything above 21C is scorching to the Poms … man, that’s a cool winter max hereabouts. I was in London last year this time, 23C beautiful and they were swooning about in ‘terrible’ heat. I’ll be there again next for another installment.
The has got to be huge engineering problems due to weight increasing by the cube but strength increasing by the square.
Otherwise whales would walk the earth.
Indeed Galileo had a famous (at the time) article making this very point titled something like “Why there can be no giants.”
You would think the intelligent thing to do would be not to build them at all.
Or if they insist, to build more, smaller ones that might hold together briefly.
Fun factoid. For about two decades, driving wind turbine generating costs down involved mostly bigger wind turbines (economies of scale). But the trend reversed about 2011 per NREL at about 2.5Mw per. Three reasons even bigger cost more rather than less:
However taller turbines can reach more consistent and speedier winds.
It would be great if the wind turbines could float in the jet stream, but obviously that isn’t going to happen unless they can beam the power down by microwave or down wires wrapped around guy wires 10+ km long.
I wonder how windy it is at the top of the Burj Khalifa…
From experience, it rocks quite a bit on a windy day!
There is nothing good about wind farms, it is all bad.
Still, it should, albeit at immense cost (environmental and financial), teach the Greenies a lesson.
If the crop of WUWT trolls are any indication, the Green Snobs are incapable of learning.
Gee that sounds familiar. Hadn’t gotten this far. 😉
Our tax dollars at work.
Our tax dollars
at workbeing transferred to the wealthy.FIFY
The fact that they have not abandoned wind and solar for nuclear power by now, with all of the information available to date, shows that they are immune to facts and logic and incapable of learning.
As bad as the Nantucket blade failure is, it is not the main failure mode of large wind turbines (~3 MW and up).
It is main axial bearing failure. This is an inherent problem that cannot be solved just by beefier engineering or better metallurgy. The reason is that wind speed aloft is always higher than windspeed near surface, simply due to surface drag. This induces an inherent bearing wobble from continuously uneven vertical loading, which eventually warps the race and cracks bearings—leading to catastrophic failure if not detected and corrected by replacement. Bearing failure causes flaming wind turbines.
Axial bearing problems/replacements are the main cause of the recent multi-billion dollar annual warranty losses at all three major wind turbine manufacturers. Warranty about 20 years, big on shore wind turbine axial bearing life about 12 at best. Off shore wind is ~3-4x the MW size of onshore. Was discussed and illustrated in post True Cost of Wind over at Judith’s some years ago.
And there is no way to support the shaft on both ends, so the flaw is inherent.
Well, there is, but then you would need 2 towers for each rotor – though one could mitigate that by using 2 counter-rotating rotors, so still 1 rotor per tower, but this would only work with a rotating platform offshore because the nacelle won’t be able to rotate to match the wind on its own.
Sounds like Rube Goldberg!
If the blades self-destruct, will they come apart somewhere along the central axis of the blade, i.e., in the direction of the centrifugal forces? if so, in what manner will they fly through the air and land on the ground or ocean surface? Like a floating/spiraling maple seed? Like a dart or spear? Or like a scythe? Or straight down like an M1 main battle tank?
It occurs to me that it could be any or all of these, and the magnitude and scope of the damages could anywhere from trivial to catastrophic, depending on where a blade lands, in what orientation, and on what. That is, unpredictably for a trustworthy risk analysis.
The blade has angular momentum, which is a vector quantity proportional to the rotational speed (radians per second) and the mass of the blade (it rotates because the air foil is designed to impart a force from one side). If the blade breaks off, the angular momentum is conserved and the blade will continue to rotate, at least initially.
I doubt if anyone knows how well an offshore wind turbine will hold up in a hurricane. I don’t know of any data to tell us. There have already been problems without hurricanes, including whale deaths, bird deaths, Engineers could have at least tested a scale model i a wind tunnel to get some idea. I can’t find any data on that either.
Windmills are based on a lot of assumptions rather than data. Electric grids worked without any windmills, so they are not necessary. There is more wind offshore than onshore, but you can’t count on strong winds when they are most needed for the highest electricity consumption hours every day
Attaching unreliable windmills to a grid where reliability is the top goal is Rube Goldberg engineering. A complete waste of money to build the windmills (aka ruinables) that will ruin the grid. Then more money will be needed to fix the grid, which will not survive a long wind drought.
Whose “top goal”? As the apologists say for disasters like the Texas Valentine Massacre ‘wind and solar are not expected to work all the time’.
It still requires two molds. Instead of bonding two cured halves together, both sides are laid up “wet,” the molds assembled together with material laid across the join, then “baked” from the inside and outside simultaneously, activating the resin. This is similar to the process used for “pre-preg” (carbon fiber or fiberglass fabric impregnated with heat cured resin) in smaller scale manufacturing processes.
The claim is that the resin can be washed away in acid and the fabric recycled. No figures are given for the cost of the acid nor for disposal of the waste acid and resin. Nor are figures provided for the “fossil” fuel energy and chemical input to the processes.
Rejection rate will likely be quite high, and blades will remain just as susceptible to damage in transport and construction.
Since NO wind turbine blades are recycled, by acid resin removal or otherwise—they are all just landfilled—we can safely assume the recycling cost is prohibitive.
Right. Recycling doesn’t work very well in any venue. Having invested in this process, I can’t see as they’d spend anything to attempt recycling, nor any operators remaining around to dismantle these behemoths. The taxpayers will be stuck with the bill.
The other claim is that these are designed to last 25 years, which as we’ve seen in onshore facilities, is optimistic to the point of fraudulent. Orders-of-magnitude greater stresses, in a marine environment, will likely reduce that to 10-12 year maximum lifecycle — or shorter for extreme weather events and lightning strike (the chances for which may be enhanced by the use of carbon fiber).
You missed the stories about some being ground up for road bed fill and/or asphalt bulking fill, and perhaps a few other tasks.
No. There are a lot of potential and experimental uses for old blades. None of them cost less than using traditional new materials for the same task.
IMO developers of such uses are seeking subsidy. And none of those developers are the operators who received subsidized profits for delivering unreliable electrical power.
Perhaps you forget the WMI experiment to chop up older balsa core blades to use them as supplemental fuel in coal and biomass burning electrical generation?
As for recycling in general, only aluminum is sometimes economically viable for collction and reuse in new finished stock. Otherwise, no matter how reusable the material, any such operation loses money.
“the force pulling on a human shoulder while spinning a 1 kg object around in an outstretched arm is only about 10 newton meters!”
I don’t think that is correct – and there’s no indication of the rpms or speed involved.
I have a feeling the reference started as the force of gravity on an outstretched arm just holding a 1 kg object roughly a metre away from the shoulder joint (for an orangutan sized arm) causes a torque of 10 Nm on the shoulder joint.
If King Louie is spinning the weight around then there would be centrifugal forces to add on, depending on the rotation speed.
No wind turbine blade can be designed against the vertical stress that exists beneath thunderstorm downbursts which can exceed 200 k.p.h. and then you have hail and lightning to add to the dangers.
Many would not know that with thunderstorms associated with fronts the wind veers 180 degrees intstantly with the passage of the front and no tower or blade structure can withstand those forces if the storm is severe.
Underneath a thunderstorm cell you could have the downburst driving all three blades downward regardless of any feathered position of the blades. Once erected they would never be checked for balance like aircraft propellers which are done every 2000 hours and once small damage starts on a blade the out of balance forces would start to affect the gear box and bearings.
Years ago the German Insurance Industry estimated the over 40% of wind turbines would have gear box and bearing failures within five years. It is a crazy way to try and produce electrical power.
These blades will not be constructed with just a few bits of carbon fibre strands, they will be predominantly of carbon fibre construction for two basic reasons, strength, and weight.
Early sailing craft constructed in GRP are nothing more than rubber tubs after a few years of flexion. Nowadays, all sailing craft are built with substantial use of carbon fibre.
Seems to me that the crux of the matter is survivability in a Hurricane. Have the builders published their study into this? What wind speed is used? Surely this information must be public? Without it one should not invest.
“The SG turbines and blades just came into production so there is no experience with them. One could say they are being beta tested off Virginia.”
That is slightly out of date. The same model of turbine is being deployed on the Moray West wind farm, offshore Scotland. The first units were connected to the grid earlier this year.