Enel hires consultant to help probe Fenner turbine collapse
Credit: By John Mariani / The Post-Standard, www.syracuse.com, 28 December 2009
Fenner, NY — Enel North America has hired a forensic engineer to look into why a 187-ton turbine at the company’s Fenner Wind Farm fell over early Sunday.
The engineer is expected to be joined by a team being put together by General Electric Co., the turbine’s manufacturer, to look into the cause of the collapse, Enel spokesman Hank Sennott said.
A security firm also is expected to be hired to take over from company officials who have been taking turns keeping the site safe from curiosity seekers, Sennott said.
Meanwhile, officials are working to stabilize pieces of the fallen giant so they don’t hurt investigators probing the wreckage, said Steve Pike, Fenner Wind Farm’s project manager.
Turbine 18, one of 20 erected in farm fields atop a ridge five miles northeast of Cazenovia, fell with a thunderous boom between 3 and 4 a.m. Sunday, neighbors said. What once stood 329 feet tall to the tip of a blade at the highest point of its arc lay sprawled across the mud and stubble of a harvested cornfield on Buyea Road.
Photographs show a rim of the structure’s concrete foundation still bolted to the turbine’s steel base, but Pike said officials could not say yet whether the foundation failed, causing the turbine to topple.
“We really just don’t know yet. It’s an area we’re looking at,” Pike said.
Officials have not ruled out weather as a cause, but have determined from data generated by the site’s other turbines that wind speeds and temperatures were moderate at the time of the collapse, he said.
“We were not in an abnormal weather pattern,” Pike said.
The wind farm cost $34 million to build and Enel officials estimate the fallen turbine would cost $2 million to $3 million to replace.
The Fenner unit is the only one to fall among the estimated 260 turbines that Enel owns in the United States and Canada, Pike said.
But turbine catastrophes, while rare, are not unheard of.
In January, a 65-foot blade flew off a turbine in England when bolts holding it onto the hub failed. Enercon manufactured that machine, operated by a company called Ecotricity.
Two months later, one turbine collapsed and another was damaged following a power outage at Noble Environmental Power’s Altona Windpark in Clinton County. Preliminary studies indicated that wiring problems prevented the GE-made turbines from shutting down as they should during an outage, allowing their blades to spin faster than their design allowed, Noble officials reported.
Tags: Wind power, Wind energy
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