Blade falls from GE turbine at Breckinridge Wind Energy Center, Oklahoma

What happened

On 31 May 2017 a blade fell from a wind turbine at NextEra Energy's 98 MW Breckinridge Wind Energy Center near Enid, Oklahoma. The turbine was made by General Electric. Engineering News-Record reported the failure as the first of four at different NextEra wind sites in about five weeks: a nacelle fire and blade loss at the Endeavor I Energy Center in Iowa on 5 June, a turbine collapse at the Steele Flats wind farm in Nebraska in early June, and a blade that snapped and was left dangling at the Tuscola Bay Wind Energy Center in Michigan in late June.

NextEra said the four were isolated equipment issues at four sites involving two equipment manufacturers, and that there were no injuries. It said that of its roughly 30,000 blades only five or six fail in a typical year, so two blade failures in a month was out of the ordinary. The cause of the Breckinridge failure was not reported.

Contributing factors

Not reported for the Breckinridge blade. NextEra described the four failures as isolated equipment issues.

Lessons learned

1. Track blade failures across a whole fleet, not site by site, so that a cluster of failures with one manufacturer or blade type is noticed early.
2. Keep exclusion zones under turbines and restrict access near turbines with blade damage or abnormal vibration.
3. Share root cause findings with the turbine manufacturer and other owners of the same model, as a blade defect at one site may be present at others.

Source

enr.com