Wind turbine, blades collapse onto southern Wisconsin field (Oops!)

MSN/AP ^ | January 21, 2023 | AP Staff

[Diana in Wisconsin]

HERMAN, WI (AP) — A company that operates a southern Wisconsin wind farm is investigating what caused part of a wind turbine and its blades to plummet to the ground, leaving debris strewn across a field.

No one was injured Wednesday night when the blades and top portion of a wind turbine collapsed in Dodge County, near the town of Herman.

The turbine, which is part of the Butler Ridge wind farm, stands about 400 feet above the ground, according to the National Weather Service.

Mark Dietrich, whose father owns the property where the collapse occurred, told WISN-TV that a nearby resident said that when it collapsed “they both heard it and it shook their house."

Dietrich said he’s glad nobody was hurt, although massive pieces of debris were left scattered across the ground and there is a large crater from the impact.

“That’s a lot of weight coming down at one time. It left quite the crater,” he said.

NextEra Energy Resources owns the turbine. The company said in statement that it believe that “this was an isolated incident as turbine malfunctions are rare."

The company said it is working to determine “the cause of the turbine failure and assessing other turbines on site as a quality-control measure.”

[Diana in Wisconsin]

“That’s a lot of weight coming down at one time. It left quite the crater,” he said.

"Safe and effective clean energy!"

Wait. Who cleans up the mess? What IF someone had died?

“...this was an isolated incident as turbine malfunctions are rare."

Liar. A simple web search tells me just the opposite:

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=wind+turbine+malfunctions&atb=v273-1&ia=web

[Fido969]

“what caused part of a wind turbine and its blades to plummet to the ground”

Uh... Gravity?

[steve86]

I believe the rate of structural failure is very low compared to lots of other industrial installations.

That’s not the problem with them.

[grey_whiskers]

So wind turbines are “safe and effective!”

They said that about the clot shots, too.

Just like they said they wanted abortions to be “safe, legal, and rare.”

I’m beginning to detect a trend here...

[G Larry]

The service life of these windmills is 20 years and they're often abandoned in place and its impossible for the property owners to get the utilities to remove them.

When the blades do reach their service life and need to be removed the transport and disposal costs are enormous. (oh, and they can't be recycled)

[imardmd1]

Four hundred feet??? Wow!

[rktman]

Safe, effective, dependable.....🐴💩

[wjcsux]

There are thousands of these pieces of garbage littering Southern California.

[Fido969]

You need to be fairly above any tree or structures in the area, and wind close to the ground had drag related to the surface. You need to be up there to really grab the wind.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

Many wind turbines in Oregon are failing at half their design lifetime...

Oregon wind farm sees blades, bolts fly off as failures mount: report
August 29, 2022

11-story tall blades flew the full length of a football field and plowed a 4-feet deep furrow in a wheat field. The heavy-duty bolts that kept the blade attached to the tower scattered like shrapnel.

Your Expensive Energy Future

A new report has revealed the unreliability of a major Oregon wind farm, discovered after a blade from a windmill detached and flew across the field.

According to The Oregonian, in January, a delivery driver found some broken, industrial-size bolts on the ground near one of Portland General Electric’s towering wind turbines but did not know who to tell and used it as a paperweight.

On Feb 1, 2022 at 2:11 am, one of the turbine’s 11-story tall blades flew the full length of a football field and plowed a 4-feet deep furrow in a wheat field. The heavy-duty bolts that kept the blade attached to the tower scattered like shrapnel.

PGE’s flagship wind facility, which opened 15 years ago to expand green energy technology in Oregon and nationally had other warning signs as well according to the outlet but it wasn’t until the blade breakdown that the company took action at Biglow Canyon, one of Oregon’s largest wind farms, and shut down all 217 turbines for testing, keeping some out of service for four months.

Though industry groups insist that wind farms are very safe and major malfunctions are rare, wind farms are growing older and components are aging.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

"Who cleans up the mess?"

That's one of the things that REALLY galls me. If you open a new surface coal mine, you have to pay HUGE surety bonds up front to make sure the site is reclaimed ten, twenty or more years down the road.

Wind farms put millions of tons of concrete in the ground, erect 200 foot towers, and put huge blades on each tower. What happens when millions of those horrible monstrosities despoiling our beautiful country all reach the end of their lives? Do you think the companies that bought them or manufactured them will still be around?

Of course not. They will have gone out of business and no reclamation bonds were paid. So those infernal machines will be blighting our landscape for 1,000 years until they fall apart. The millions of tons of concrete in the ground will just be abandoned and never go away.

If we had a level playing field, the damn companies building and operating these infernal machines would have to pay their surety bonds up front. But that won't happen because the green lobby strong-arms Congress to make sure it doesn't happen. So the costs of windmills are artificially low and do not include decommissioning and reclamation costs.

[meatloaf]

I was on a project where the windmills were being replaced after seven years.

They might last about ten years. Twenty years ... no way.

[laweeks]

Maybe a really big bird got whoomphed.

[Secret Agent Man]

Yeah, don’t they seem to catch on fire more? Like either hydraulics for brakes go or the gear lubricants leak and cause problems?

[Taxman]

Ping

[AZJeep]

Looking at the wind turbines, most of then do not seem to work, just standing standstill.
There is no good way to recycle them, so there is some huge landfill being filled up with them.
They do not last too long as the plastic blades hitting birds and other particles disintegrate quickly.
There have been some spectacular failures before, but those are indeed not that common.

[Revel]

Mamma’s don’t let your children play around windmills.

[hecticskeptic]

Metal fatigue in the bolts that hold the tower sections... it must have been like sitting beside a popcorn maker when they all blew off, essentially at once. It is the Achilles heal of all IWTs....

[Ronaldus Magnus III]

#1’s DuckDuckGo link is certainly telling. Besides the hundreds of blade fails and fires, in one of the articles is this: “”Each wind turbine costs in excess of £2 million and generates an estimated income of more than £500,000 per year.””

This so-called ‘generated income’ includes all the massive subsidies. Just like the solar power scam, every subsidy is TAKEN from taxpayers. Without the massive theft (taxpayer $$$) there is no ‘market’ for wind or solar. Only the massive leviathan of centralized government can make this happen.

[DesertRhino]

Wonder how often they get hit by lightning?