Wind Turbines Taller Than the Statue of Liberty Are Falling Over
Breakdowns of towers and blades have bedeviled manufacturers in the US and Europe.
A Vestas megawatt turbine, missing its nose cone, at Portland General Electric’s Biglow Canyon wind farm in Wasco County, Oregon, last year.
Photographer: Dave Killen/The OregonianOn a calm, sunny day last June, Mike Willey was feeding his cattle when he got a call from the local sheriff’s dispatcher. A motorist had reported that one of the huge turbines at a nearby wind farm had collapsed in dramatic fashion. Willey, chief of the volunteer fire department in Ames, 90 miles northwest of Oklahoma City, set out to survey the scene.
The steel tower, which once stood hundreds of feet tall, was buckled in half, and the turbine blades, whose rotation took the machine higher than the Statue of Liberty, were splayed across the wheat field below. The turbine, made by General Electric Co., had been in operation less than a year. “It fell pretty much right on top of itself,” Willey says.