A Monster Wind Turbine Is Upending an Industry

The turning diameter of its rotor is longer than two American football fields end to end. Later models will be taller than any building on the mainland of Western Europe.

The G.E. machines will have a generating capacity that would have been almost unimaginable a decade ago. A single one will be able to turn out 13 megawatts of power, enough to light up a town of roughly 12,000 homes.

The race to build bigger turbines has moved faster than many industry figures foresaw. G.E.’s Haliade-X generates almost 30 times more electricity than the first offshore machines installed off Denmark in 1991.

In coming years, customers are likely to demand even bigger machines, industry executives say. On the other hand, they predict that, just as commercial airliners peaked with the Airbus A380, turbines will reach a point where greater size no longer makes economic sense.

I believe that you have hit upon the REAL inconvenient truth.

BTW, being a Civil Engineer by education, when I first entered the petroleum business I did the wind load and overturning moment calculations on commonly used large field oil treating vessels. Under normal conditions the footings were not large enough to prevent them from being blown over. Sufficient footings were so far out of the box and the convention had survived with few enough problems pressing on was not worth the effort. Thus, guy wires and lots of connected pipe work prevented toppling. So it goes.

Point being made is, soil failure in foundations resulting in toppling is cumulative. In some conditions many of these conventionally designed structures will topple. The bigger ones will be interesting. I see they are using a lot of suction pile anchors in the offshore installations. We never used them for extended periods of time that I am aware of, just for temporary mooring anchors.

There sure is a lot of concrete and steel in the foundations for these things already. I’m sure all loads are being taken into account.

There sure is a lot of concrete and steel in the foundations for these things already. I’m sure all loads are being taken into account.
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Yes but there has been lots of problems with IWTs. I’m a mechanical engineer and while IWTs are not my primary expertise/interest, I’ve had a lot of experience with large rotating machinery in general. I’ve been asked to get involved in analyzing a few of the failures. There have certainly been some with foundation problems but if there are catastrophic failures, the problems are typically elsewhere. There is a volunteer organization in the UK that does a fairly good job at documenting IWT failures, recording fatalities etc. I’ve been in touch with this group and have used them as a resource on a number of occasions..... http://www.caithnesswindfarms.co.uk/index.htm

Interestingly, there have been quite a few IWT failures this fall...

https://energywatch.eu/EnergyNews/Renewables/article12579896.ece For some reason, the failure of an IWT in Sweden a month ago garnered lots of attention. The various articles I found keep mentioning that ‘no construction people got hurt’ which makes one wonder if this IWT had ever run. It of course was “rare”… apparently the first such incident in Sweden. Mind you if it was the 100th or the 1,000th, it will still be reported as being rare. “Rare” is the operative word that the industry always throws out there....

Apparently the picture at the above link is for the next failure I’m mentioning here….

https://renewablesnow.com/news/tower-bolts-failure-led-to-2015-collapse-of-vestas-turbine-in-sweden-559782/ Here’s another failure and this one was a while ago so I guess the previous one wasn’t the first one in Sweden after all. This is quite an interesting failure…. says that the analysis indicated the tower bolts fatigued after 3 years. “According to the authority, the joint failure is due to fatigue in the bolts that had held together the joint, resulting from the bolts, tower sections and tools not being protected from rain and snow during the installation.” That’s a very specific failure mechanism…. Are they saying that there was ice on the flange that prevented the sections from being bolted up tight together during construction and so the bolts were not torqued as tight as they should have been after the ice melted? Definitely not clear to me....

https://www.rechargenews.com/wind/first-findings-in-vestas-v150-blade-plunge-point-to-isolated-incident/2-1-887806 And while taking a look at the previous link, this one popped up…. this one was a ‘blade plunge’ and that alone of course allows it to qualify as being another ‘rare’ event. Not sure what went on with this... the blade just fell off?

https://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/1694007/vestas-edpr-investigate-why-v150-blade-broke-off-ohio-site And then there is this one... Very interesting picture at the link and at the bottom of the piece, it says this… “CEO Henrik Andersen told reporters at a press conference that the issue was related to “high-intensity lightning”.” I’m almost inclined to believe it…. if that blade had of broke up while the thing was spinning, the out of balance forces would have ensured that the tower wouldn’t have been left standing. It’s almost as if lighting hit the peak point, broke the blade and it flopped over. What is interesting is that the blade snapped at the point that it did… say 25 feet from the hub. Why there?

It looks like all of these were Vestas IWTs in the 3 to 4 meg size range. All except for the second one occurred just in the last couple of months. Vestas must be reeling after hits like this…. and that’s just the ones that popped up in a matter of minutes of surfing.

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