American energy equipment manufacturer GE Vernova has blamed its latest offshore blade failure on a giant 13 MW wind turbine on a combination of storm winds during the commissioning process.
The failure at the massive 3.6GW Dogger Bank project in the North Sea last week was the third GE Vernova wind turbine blade failure in the last four months, but the company insists that the failures at the two offshore wind farms are unrelated.
“A GE Vernova analysis has established that during the commissioning process being performed by GE Vernova, the turbine was left in a fixed and static position, rendering it vulnerable during a subsequent storm with high winds,” the company said in a statement.
“GE Vernova analysis has shown that this blade event was not caused by an installation or manufacturing issue but instead occurred during the commissioning process.”
GE Vernova told journalists that the yaw system, which orients the rotor towards the wind, was disabled, leaving the turbine blade vulnerable during a large storm.
The announcement comes just over a week after the blade failed during construction on a 13MW Haliade-X turbine at Doger Bank A, the first of three 1.2GW phases currently under construction.
In May, damage was sustained to a single blade during construction at Dogger Bank as a result of an installation issue.
Three months later another GE Vernova blade failed, this time during the construction of Vineyard Wind, the first commercial-scale offshore wind farm to be built in the United States.
The project’s developers claimed that “a manufacturing deviation is considered to be the primary root cause of the blade event, which should have been identified through the quality assurance process at the blade manufacturing facility.”
The third blade to fail, and the second at Dogger Bank, was reported on August 22 and billed only as “a blade failure”.
