Blade failures are more prevalent
Kokomo Tribune | February 20, 2014 | www.kokomotribune.com
On today’s front page story [Feb. 19], E.ON indicated wind turbine blade failures are a rare occurrence. This may not be completely true. A Google search for “wind turbine blade failures” returned more than a million hits.
There are a tremendous number of news articles from every country in the world about wind turbine failures. Too many to be ignored.
A dark side of the wind industry many media outlets have failed to report on is the thousands of documented cases of serious accidents. These include numerous documented cases of turbines falling over, blades flying off, injuries to workers and the public, and at least 99 reported fatal accidents. Of the deaths, 67 were wind industry and direct-support workers or small turbine operators, and 32 were public fatalities.
According to the Caithness Windfarm Information Forum, as more wind farms are built, more failures occur. The forum notes that of the average 104 turbine incidents each year, by far the biggest number are related to blade failure resulting in either whole blades or pieces of blades being thrown from the turbine. A total of 208 separate blade failure incidents have been reported up to June 2011.
Russell Turk
Sharpsville
URL to article: https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2014/02/20/blade-failures-are-more-prevalent/