Monday, December 28, 2009

Rethinking wind tower safety ~ By Perry White

Watertown Daily TimesRethinking wind tower safety
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.

 link to full article...

1 comment:

acpb said...

We have all heard the pro wind people parroting what the developers tell them "the setbacks asked for by wind law committees are too restrictive". We have heard them say that the chances of equipment failure and ice throw are "miniscule". Well Fenner has 20 wind turbines and in less than 20 years they have had two instances of blade failure and now a tower collapse. New York has had two towers collapse in this year alone. This does not seem to be miniscule.