Hilarious… makes one wonder why this particular IWT failure got so much attention. The various articles I found about this failure keep mentioning that ‘no construction people got hurt’ which makes one wonder if this IWT had ever run. It of course has to have some info that indicates it was rare… yup, the mandatory statement that it was the first such incident in Sweden.
Apparently the picture at the article about the IWT failure this weekend is for the next failure….
https://renewablesnow.com/news/tower-bolts-failure-led-to-2015-collapse-of-vestas-turbine-in-sweden-559782/ …wait a minute, so this failure was in Sweden too? So I guess the one this past weekend wasn’t the first one. 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?
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 pops up…. this one was a ‘blade plunge’ which of course definitely allows it to qualify as being an ‘isolated incident’. None of the other failures involved a blade PLUNGE.
https://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/1694007/vestas-edpr-investigate-why-v150-blade-broke-off-ohio-site …..and this one. Very interesting picture at this one 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 tower wouldn’t have been left standing due to the massive out of balance forces. It’s almost as if lighting hit the peak point, broke the blade and it flopped over. What is interesting is that the blade would have 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.
There were €175 million of extraordinary warranty provisions for the “specific repair and upgrade of already-installed blades” the company said when presenting its results in August.