Rethinking wind tower safety
Credit: By Perry White, Watertown Daily Times, www.watertowndailytimes.com, 28 December 2009
Another wind tower has collapsed, this one in the Madison County Wind Farm in the town of Fenner. The nine-year-old tower collapsed Saturday night, apparently when power was lost to the tower. This is the second such collapse in upstate New York this year; in March, a tower collapsed in Altona, Franklin County, when it, too, lost power. Clearly, this issue is one that needs further study and one that should be giving pause to towns in the north country that are rushing to get permissive laws on the books for commercial wind farm development.
These two collapses are far from the only ones, however. In Denmark in 2008, a tower collapsed when the braking system failed and the blades spun out of control, eventually shattering the nacelle and sending debris well beyond the collapse range of one and a half times the tower height. In Oldenburg, Germany, a tower collapsed in November 2006 when a rotor shattered, bringing the entire tower down; large chunks of blade debris landed more than 200 meters – 660 feet – from the tower.
[rest of article available at www.watertowndailytimes.com]
Tags: Wind power, Wind energy
Some possibly related stories:
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- State launches investigation into turbine collapse; Public Service Commission to determine cause
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