By P Gosselin
A 70-metre-long rotor blade of a V150 wind turbine fell from a height of 123 meters at the Lübbenow wind farm in Germany, heightening concerns about the safety of wind turbines.
AI generated symbol image. Hat-tip: Blackout News.
The affected turbine had been put into operation only 6 years ago, in 2019.
The incident raises questions about just how safe wind turbines really are. The incident is one in a series of technical defects. In January 2017, a rotor blade broke near Zichow (presumably due to a pitch control failure). In 2016: An entire wind turbine tower collapsed in Grimmen. A short time later, a Nordex 149 tower in Güstow had to be taken down for safety reasons. This affected a total of 18 identical turbines in Germany following a collapse in the Ruhr area in 2021 due to a design fault.
The Brandenburg Ministry of the Environment counted five accidents within two and a half years (as of August 2023), but no complete overview exists, as there is no central data collection for the dismantling of turbines and it is unclear who is responsible for the recycling and disposal of old turbine parts.
Not only are wind turbines prone to catastrophic failures, but they severely impact the quality of life of local residents due to the noise pollution they cause, especially in north-westerly winds. The rattling and clattering affect residents, restaurants and tourism. The rapid expansion of wind turbines has been accompanied by inadequate control systems and a lack of consideration for local residents.
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Poorly designed/built mechanical components break under stress!
Who knew?
They should be fitted with parachutes that deploy if detachment from the tower is detected.
I’m assuming your comment is in jest. If not, you are describing what can also be called an ‘airfoil’. This airfoil will let the large piece of junk travel much farther from the separation point. This heavy item can still kill people simply because of the mass that comes down on them. Your ‘solution’ will only expand the danger zone.
With rotating components, such as wind turbines, one cannot design for mechanical factors-of-safety based solely on peak stress levels . . . one must also design for both Low Cycle Fatigue (LCF) and High Cycle Fatigue (HCF). In many cases, there can be HCF ultimate (i.e., catastrophic) failures that occur without peak design “steady-state” loads ever being reached on any component in the stressed system.
And in many cases (such as with composite materials like fiberglass and carbon fiber, due to their inherent material/manufacturing variability), the only way to realistically estimate HCF margin-against-failure is to perform a LOT of production lot sampling and running each sample to beyond its full design life number of cycles . . . for wind turbines that would involve running in excess of 32 million cycles for 20 years design life (estimated based on an average 10 rpm* for the turbine blades with a 30% average operational rate). Imagine trying to do that QC testing at any accelerated pace for full size turbine blades!
KA-CHING!
*note that each turbine blade experiences a variation in loading (stress) with each rotation as it crosses in front of the support tower and simultaneously encounters the variation in wind loading associated with “ground effect” in wind speed compared to the topmost segment of its rotation.
Totally agree that mechanical stress is a complex area.
I disagree that good quality life testing is difficult.
Instrument up each of the three blades of the proposed design. Use 3 axis vibration sensors or accelerometers.
Take one new blade and mount it in a jig where it is bent and twisted to replicate the movement experienced and measured in real life.
Increase the speed/frequency of the test stimulus to get accelerated life tests completed.
Repeat until you have amassed a useful body of knowledge.
Tedious and expensive but not impossible.
I suppose its much cheaper to roll out untested designs. It’s only members of the public who may be damaged so why waste money. /s
Yes, “tedious and expensive”. KA-CHING!
Or one could work with a helicopter / tiltrotor manufacturer and learn how they do fatigue testing and fatigue analysis so successfully. And have been doing it successfully for decades.
These ‘renewable energy components’ aren’t safe to transport either:
I watch all MGUY’s videos- good information and entertaining.
I was on I-70 Monday after it happened. Fortunately for me, I was east bound and east of the accident. I mentioned it in an earlier article.
It happened. No raptors were killed or injured and that is the good news. The only good news except, perhaps, that single blade will not be involved in raptor homicide.
There was a recent accident where I live in Australia, involving the transport of wind turbine parts.
“A POLICE investigation has been launched after a truck carrying a wind turbine tower got stuck under a Warrego Highway overpass early on Friday morning, causing traffic delays and long detours.”
https://localipswichnews.com.au/news/mt-crosby-overpass-crash/#:~:text=Initial%20investigations%20suggest%20the%20driver,taken%20to%20hospital%20for%20assessment
That one’s gone with wind too. And, frankly, I do give a damn. May they all perish.
Bladerunner – desperate to get out of the way!
Bladerunawayer
From The Australian 2/7/2025 (paywalled)
Offshore wind developer BlueFloat Energy is weighing a potential sale of its Victorian project as it considers its future in Australia, posing a significant setback for the green energy transition as a major electricity transmission line between NSW and Victoria was hit with a two-year delay.
Bluefloat, headquartered in Spain, last year secured a feasibility licence to develop an offshore wind project off Victoria’s Gippsland region and also won a preliminary development licence in NSW, a project that garnered sizeable local opposition.
Sources said they expected BlueFloat to exit Australia, though no final decision had been made. A spokesman for BlueFloat declined to comment.
Concerns over the transition to renewables have also deepened after the major Victoria–NSW electricity interconnector project was hit with a fresh two-year delay amid opposition to the development from farmers worried about the route.
So much for offshore wind in Oz as we’d also have to pay the enormous cost of getting installation shipping and craneage from the Northern Hemisphere when they’re struggling with blowout costs and failing turbine blades already.
When will governments learn that, ultimately, it’s economics that rules everything, not government diktat?
In all too many cases, they’ll never learn. When it’s other people’s money you are playing with, you can ignore the normal rules of economics safe in the knowledge that when the eagle does eventually hit the turbine blade (modern take on an old idiom) it’ll be somebody else who’ll have to pick up the pieces.
Ugh that awful Trump tariff man! Can we have some please?
France’s Verkor calls for ‘local for local’ after Northvolt collapse
Rotating components by their nature will continue to fail if not life tracked and removed from service when retirement is due. The life limits should be field and experience verifiable, not just an engineering calculation. The materials, methods, and manufacturing processes used on much of this hardware are in their infancy, along with the non-destructive inspection ability to detect latent defects. Manufacturing defects can and will creep into the fielded products.
I was horrified to read that very long blades are manufactured in two pieces and then ‘glued’ together in the field. Who signed off on that design? There is no way to fabricate a field joint reliably. Temperature, humidity, the physics of fixturing, dirt blowing, inspectors not looking closely, no way of doing a real x-ray job. Russian roulette.
I’m just shocked that you expected the renewable industry to do the job safely and responsibly!!
What’s the ‘signing off’ about?
You expect someone to put their name to one of these things?
I have seen a video of the interior of a windmill and the whole tower was moving as the blades moved.
Facebook had a good picture the other day of a bulldozer burying piles of old windmill blades under dirt.
They can’t be recycled, so they are buried.
I don’t think the geniuses who dreamed this windmill stupidity up thought things through to the end.
Most did not think things through passed the deposits in their bank accounts.
Typo: past (not passed)
Some good news from late 2024 was that Denmark’s largest offshore wind farm project failed to attract any bidders.
I did enjoy their optimism in Oz with nothing to show but a winning rights tender-
Offshore wind developer BlueFloat Energy is weighing a potential sale of its Victorian project as it considers its future in Australia….
although as these tenders go the shortlisters tend to get remunerated for their efforts win or lose and they’re usually a cosy club adept at doing over the drones in Gummint to the detriment of taxpayers.
But they are Green Prayer Wheels, showing your devotion to the cause. Actually producing power is entirely secondary to the virtue signaling.
Oh the irony.
STORY TIP
https://taiwannews.com.tw/news/5921944
Seems they are using CO2 in their fire suppression system.
Multiple workers injured when the CO2 cylinder ruptured.
To dispose of the worn-out blades, I propose that they should cut up with chain saws
into smaller sections, formed into bundles which are then dropped into a volcano using
a heavy-lift helicopter such as the Russian Sky Crane.
The blades are made from fiber glass, epoxy resin, and balsa wood internal panels. In the volcano, the epoxy resin and balsa wood would be incinerated. The fiber glass would melt and mix into the lava.
Maybe include a few politicians and IPCC personnel?
. . . and the (most likely toxic) fumes from burning those blades in the non-stoichiometric combustion that would occur above volcano lava would then be released into Earth’s atmosphere for all to “enjoy”.
BTW, fiberglass (E glass) fibers are 54 percent silica (mp = 3,115 °F), 15 percent alumina (mp = 3,762 °F), 16 percent calcia (mp = 1,548 °F), 9.5 percent boron oxide (mp = 950 °F), and 5 percent magnesia (mp = 1,202 °F) by weight.
Lava’s temperature ranges between 1,300 to 2,200 °F, so it is doubtful that the silica and alumina, together almost 70% of the fiberglass fibers, will “melt”. And since they are already oxides, they will not burn in air.
As such a lovely dream crashes in the face of stark reality.
I just checked. E Type fiberglass has a melting point of 1121° C and would thus melt and mix with the lava.
1121 °C is equivalent to 2050 °F, very close to the maximum temperature observed in molten lava.
Since you did not cite a reference, I suspect your cited “melting” point of 2050 °F actually represents the initial melting of the combined calcia, boron oxide fibers and the magnesia fibers that comprise some 31% of the total mix of “E glass”, but not the melting of the higher mp materials that I listed.
I guess it’s also remotely possible that the cited 2050 °F temperature may represent a eutectic melting point, similar to what can happen with some mixtures of metals. For example:
“The melting point of silica is 3,110°F (1,710°C) and that of alumina is 3,722°F (2,050°C). At the eutectic point, when 10% alumina and 90% silica are mixed, the melting point is only 2,813°F (1,545°C). All other ratios of silica and alumina have higher melting points.”
— https://ceramicartsnetwork.org/ceramics-monthly/ceramics-monthly-article/Phase-and-Eutectics
In any event, this is all basically irrelevant musings as the odds are less than one-in-a-million that we’ll ever see discarded fiberglass wind turbine blades being discarded into active volcanoes.
Damn. Now I have to strike that from my bucket list.
/humor
Whether windmills are safe or not isn’t as important as they don’t work, they are expensive, they are a danger to the grid, they are a drain on government funds, they kill wildlife and they are ugly. If we can get rid of them for safety reasons I am all for it.
Every point you make that is more important is also a safety risk. Physical (human) safety is only one form.
Ooops…well, s happens..I suspect just wait-things will get pretty dicey pretty soon-just too many variables, and too many windmills. Just a matter of time.