I have been made aware by a Longhirst resident of an article in the Times of a wind turbine collapsing in Hornslet / Denmark.
There are some pretty spectacular videos of this on youtube: (e.g.: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5u_H2zrvTA&NR=1)
It is pretty difficult to find objective information about an incident like this.
Here is, what I found:
- the Copenhagen Post writes about 2 wind turbines collapsing. Both would have been operated by Vestas.
- I haven't found any press releases on the website of Vestas.
- The Danish Wind Industry Association writes, of a 600 kW Nordtank turbine at Halling in Eastern Jutland and a Vestas V47 600kW wind turbine at Vig in Odsherred.
The turbine seems to have experianced a so called runwaway event causing its blades to spin out of control.
Preliminary findings seem to indicate that human errors in service and maintenance are to blame.
- If you read German, the Science Blogs are quite interesting reading:
- wind turbines have an inbuilt safety system to prevent the blades running too fast: the blade angle can be altered, the turbine can be turned and there is a mechanical brake to stop the blades from rotating at all.
- in the above incidents these safety systems seem to have failed (due to poor maintenance?) and the rotor started to turn out of control, finally the centrifugal forces were too much and one blade broke, causing the other blades to crash into the tower....
- there has been enough warning to evacuate the area and to get video cameras set up to film the event. Nobody was hurt.
To put this into relation: in the UK there are 2033 wind turbines operational. Vestas have 35000 turbines worldwide operational and incidents like this seem to be the exception.
I would welcome any comments to this page especially from RES and Novera Energy.
