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Offshore wind turbine and blade manufacturer GE Vernova has come out claiming three separate blade accidents in four months, two on Dogger Bank and one at Vineyard Wind, were completely unrelated.
The latest of the three blade failures happened on an installed turbine at the Dogger Bank A offshore wind farm on August 22.
The incident occurred as a strong storm was approaching and high winds hitting the Dogger Bank site. At the time, the turbine rotor was left in a fixed and static position and the yaw system that lets the nacelle turn to face the wind was disabled.
This, according to a statement from the company, made the blades vulnerable during high winds. GE Vernova added that its analysis showed that the incident was “not caused by an installation or manufacturing issue”.
The first Dogger Bank incident happened in May because of an installation issue and it involved a Haliade-X turbine, the same model involved in all three incidents.
Dogger Bank A is the first of the three phases of the UK’s Dogger Bank Wind Farm which is the world’s biggest offshore wind farm under construction and is set to be fully operational until 2025.
The 3.6GW Dogger Bank is being constructed in three 1.2GW phases known as Dogger Bank A, B, and C some 130 km off the coast of Yorkshire.
Between the two Dogger Bank incidents there was a blade failure at the Vineyard Wind farm in July, linked to a manufacturing issue. The affected blade experienced a manufacturing deviation in the form of insufficient bonding.
There were no injuries from either event but Nantucket beaches were strewn with fibreglass shards and green and white foam with more debris found in the water later on as the state of the blade deteriorated. This prompted the closing of a total of six beaches during clean-up operations.
The statement by the manufacturer that there the three failures were not linked to any single engineering flaw is the only positive thing in all of this as GE Vernova did suffer large criticism over these incidents.
Since the Vineyard Wind incident, environmentalist group Green Oceans called for a federal and state moratorium on all offshore wind development in the wake of the incident off Nantucket.
More recently, New England fishing captains held a floating protest near the damaged turbine at the Vineyard Wind offshore wind farm claiming that “offshore wind is allowed to kill fish and wreck nurseries without any manageable stopping point.” |
