Vineyard Wind, the big offshore wind farm being built south of Nantucket Island, is on hold after one of the blades broke and pieces washed ashore on that island of millionaires. One of many stories here.
Not good news but hardly fatal to the industry. It should be up and running soon. Less than half the 800 MW of turbines have been built so far.
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And now they’ve shut down the remaining turbines. I would assume this failure was due to a manufacturing defect in one of the blades. I saw this type of failure when I worked on the Fayette wind farm in the Altamont Pass, California. Those failures were due to a notch failure at the root of the blade as it was attached to the hub. It turned out to be caused by the very last operation at the manufacturing plant where the lowest paid employee trimmed the fiberglas around the base of the blade with a Sawzall. He cut too deep and into the 2×4 steel spar. The cycling of the blades while spinning put alternate positive and negative stress on the spar. Eventually, those hundred thousands of cycles caused the failure.
You claim “It should be up and running soon”
I’m not so sure. If this were a truly isolated incident of a turbine in production for years, then maybe. However, this is a new, huge turbine – 13 MW peak output (I think Rumney’s project has 3 MW turbines), so it could be any of “infant mortality,” manufacturing flaw, or design flaw.
If the debris stayed near the tower, restarting the others wouldn’t offer much risk. However, people have picked up a lot of debris from their millionaire-ridden beach. While that reduces the risk of fiberglass injury to all, I imagine the risk to fish, whales, lobsters, etc is a concern, and to critters like me that eat some of those.
It’s not the first blade failure. I haven’t hunted it down, but https://nantucketcurrent.com/news/what-we-know-about-the-cause-of-the-vineyard-wind-turbine-failure-so-far says:
Just two months ago, another GE Vernova turbine suffered blade damage at the Dogger Bank Wind Farm in the North Sea off the eastern shore of England. According to a report from the company, “damage was sustained to a single blade on an installed turbine at Dogger Bank A offshore wind farm. In line with safety procedures, the surrounding marine area has been restricted and relevant authorities notified. No one was injured or in the vicinity, at the time the damage was sustained.”
FWIW, GE Vernova stock (the energy branch of what was GE) fell from $182.74 per share two days ago to $161.49 today, an 11.6% fall.
An aside – “Hi Earl!”
I imagine a decent root cause analysis could take months.
From https://newbedfordlight.org/vineyard-wind-damaged-turbine-blade-likely-to-fall-nantucket-marthas-vineyard/ :
The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement earlier this week issued a suspension order, halting all operations and construction at the site until Vineyard Wind and GE submit a “root cause analysis.”
The analysis involves visually inspecting the turbine and retracing the blade every step of the way — from its production in a factory in Canada to installation south of Martha’s Vineyard.
So far, responders have collected about six truckloads of fiberglass and foam debris from Nantucket shores, all of which will be shipped off the island (and some of which has already been transported to New Bedford for analysis).