The regularity of extremely rare catastrophic wind machine failures

Wind energy spokespeople frequently use the same language to explain the "rare" and exciting destruction of their turbines.

“…exceedingly rare…” “…very rare…” “He says such breaks are rare…”

— A single spokesman for NextEra energy explaining three separate catastrophic wind machine failures that all took place in June 2017.

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All of the wind turbines in northeast Missouri were taken offline last week according to a local report from KTVO-TV3. Last weekend, the entire top of a turbine in the region, blades and all, mysteriously just fell off.  

A KTVO photo reveals a dramatic mess that resembles a 300-foot-tall mosquito made of steel and fiberglass that has crashed into a farm field. 

Of course, it’s not fair to judge the wind power industry by one anecdote.

In a report posted earlier this week for the Capital Research Center, I noted that spectacular wind machine malfunctions are often rare and frequently an isolated incident:

A previous report for Capital Research Center featured fires, tower collapses, and other failures of turbines owned by NextEra Energy. As with MidAmerican Energy, NextEra also responded with comically redundant excuses:

“We believe this was an isolated incident” (turbine fire in March 2023),

“We believe this was an isolated incident as turbine malfunctions are rare” (tower collapse in January 2023),

“it is a rare occurrence for this to happen” (tower collapse in June 2022),

“Turbine fires are rare” (December 2020),

“exceedingly rare” (an Iowa fire in June 2017);

“very rare” (a Nebraska tower collapse, also in June 2017);

“He says such breaks are rare” (blade break in Michigan, yet again in June 2017).

A couple of months back in January 2024, a GE wind turbine crashed to the ground after its tower bent in half in Logan County, Colorado. The photos this time looked like a crashed jetliner ablaze, with black smoke and flames billowing out. 

"This is the first downed tower we've had," said the fire chief on the scene. The CBS News report helpfully added that another turbine tower “about a dozen miles southwest” had “collapsed in 2022.”

I wrote about the rare troubles with GE turbines back in April: “Media accounts from January 2022 through January 2024 show at least 13 fires, blade breaks, tower collapses, and other serious malfunctions credited to GE wind machines.”

These included:

• October 2023: Two blades snap off the same GE turbine in Germany, at the same wind farm that had the same problem in September 2022. 

• March 2023: GE turbine tower buckles and collapses at new facility in Lithuania.

• Also in March 2023, a GE turbine in New York catches fire, high winds scatter the burning debris. 

• January 2023: GE turbine collapses in Wisconsin. 

• October 2022: GE turbine catches fire in the Irish Sea.

• August 2022: GE turbine in Oklahoma catches fire and crashes to ground. 

• July 2022: GE turbine in Texas catches fire.

• Also in July 2022: Blade breaks from GE turbine in Sweden. One media source reported that children had been picking berries nearby. 

• June 2022: GE turbine in Oklahoma crashes down, after reportedly less than a year in operation. 

• Also in June 2022: GE turbine collapses in Colorado.

• January 2022: Blade breaks off a GE wind machine in Germany. 

But if you’re in the market for one of these unintentionally exciting energy systems, don’t just look at General Electric.

As I wrote in February, Vestas can also be very competitive:

At 2:11 a.m. on February 1, 2022, according to a report in The Oregonian, a wind turbine at the Biglow Canyon Wind Farm in Oregon hurled one of its giant blades the “full length of a football field” away from its tower. Described as heavier than “four Toyota Camrys” and “as tall as an 11-story building,” the detached blade sliced a four-foot-deep crater in a nearby farm field. In an eerie newspaper photo, the crash site looked like the wreckage of an alien spacecraft.

A few days earlier a driver delivering fertilizer had recovered and photographed “industrial-size bolts” on the ground near the troubled tower. His coworker returned to the same location during the evening of January 31, just hours before the blade flung loose, to tow out the vehicle of another delivery worker who had gotten stuck in the mud.

“Someone could have been killed or badly injured,” observed Kathryn McCullough, whose husband farmed the same fields.

Owned by Portland General Electric, the turbine was built by Vestas, a Danish firm that has been one of the world’s largest producers of wind-energy machines.

Those Oregonians just rave about Vestas . . .

“The Vestas turbines, they lose doors all the time and you’ll see them laying in the field,” confirmed another farmer quoted in the report. “They’d hurt you. My neighbors won’t park by them.”

The report also cited an official from the Oregon Department of Energy who estimated that the items falling from 265 feet up could smash into the ground (or anything and anyone else) at nearly 90 miles per hour.

And like GE, Vestas troubles are regularly rare:

But Biglow Canyon is far from the only place where Vestas turbines have been behaving badly according to the media. There were at least a half dozen additional incidents in the 20 months after the flying blade failure in Oregon.

In June 2022, an entire tower with a Vestas turbine fell over at an Australian facility run by the Iberdrola energy firm. “The failure of turbine 43 at Alinta Wind Farm is a serious event,” said the Iberdrola’s Australia CEO. “We are currently working closely with regulatory bodies and the operations and maintenance contractor, Vestas, to understand the factors that have contributed to the failure of the turbine.”

A fire broke out at a Vestas turbine in Germany in December 2022, according to ReNews.Biz.

And in October 2022, a turbine owned by Warren Buffett’s MidAmerican Energy caught on fire in Iowa. According to ReNews.Biz, the Vestas turbines at the facility had “began operating in 2020.”

“An incident such as this is an extremely rare occurrence—throughout our fleet we have experienced only one other fire of this magnitude in the nearly 20 years since we began operating our first wind farm,” said a MidAmerican official.

He soon learned the wind turbine gods can be as capricious as the wind itself. Almost precisely a year later, in October 2023, another Vestas turbine at a different MidAmerican facility in Iowa reportedly caught fire.

“Local fire brigades from Adair and surrounding towns responded but could do little as they lacked equipment to reach the nacelle,” reported ReCharge. “The fire eventually consumed the nacelle and one of the blades, with burning debris falling into surrounding cornfields that sent up plumes of smoke that could be seen for miles.”

Local TV news caught a dramatic video of a flaming blade crashing to the ground. “An incident such as this is an extremely rare occurrence,” the MidAmerican official reportedly said once again.

According to other media accounts, 2023 had already been a thrilling year for Vestas turbines.

In February 2023, ReNews.Biz reported a fire at a Vestas machine in Denmark, its home nation. The report did not quote anyone claiming the fire was a “rare occurrence.”

Good thing, because in August 2023, EnergyVoice reported an offshore Vestas turbine had caught fire just off the coast of Norfolk in the United Kingdom. A BBC account featured several dramatic photos of the destroyed machine billowing black smoke that could be easily seen from the coastline.

As I pointed out in October, regular rarity is costly: 

In January 2023, a Bloomberg News story carried this alarming headline: “Wind Turbines Taller Than the Statue of Liberty Are Falling Over.”

According to the report, there had been a “rash of recent wind turbine malfunctions across the US and Europe, ranging from failures of key components to full collapses” and that some “industry veterans say they’re happening more often.”

“The problems have added hundreds of millions of dollars in costs for the three largest Western turbine makers, GE, Vestas Wind Systems and Siemens Energy’s Siemens Gamesa unit. These problems could result in more expensive insurance policies,” warned Bloomberg. An insurer quoted in the story said he was “seeing these failures happening in a shorter time frame on the newer turbines” and predicted higher insurance costs or outright limits on coverage if the quality continued to decline.

General Electric reported a $2.2 billion loss in 2022 on GE Renewable Energy, the division responsible for building GE’s wind turbines. This added to $795 million in red ink reported for 2021.

In June 2023, Reuters reported that Siemens Energy had announced that “quality problems at its wind turbine unit would take years to fix.” By August, Siemens had upped the estimated cost of fixing these troubles to $1.75 billion.

But don’t feel bad for them. As I wrote in April, your tax dollars are riding to the rescue:

An April 2023 CNBC report was titled: “From GE to Siemens, the wind energy industry hopes billions in losses are about to end.”

It predicted a possible end to a “tough couple of years for the U.S. wind energy industry” because of an “air of optimism within the industry, driven in large part by billions of dollars in new tax credits and subsidies toward clean energy investments included in the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act.”