Two more wind turbines suffer damage in Canada and Norway

The wind energy industry continues to suffer a plague of embarrassing headlines after two more turbines were damaged in recent days, with the hub and blades falling off a turbine in Canada and a turbine blade disintegrating at a wind farm in Norway.

In Ontario, a turbine hub and attached turbine blades fell from the main body of a wind turbine at the 99MW Erie Shores Wind Farm, which is owned and operated by Capstone Infrastructure.

The turbine failure reportedly took place on Saturday evening, when at “approximately 5:03 p.m., the hub detached from the tower and fell to the ground with all three blades still attached,” said Megan Hunter, senior manager of communications for Capstone, in a statement to CTV News.

“No employees or members of the public were injured – the landowners, neighbours, and their properties are safe.”

“The scene is secure, and out of an abundance of caution, the entire wind farm has been taken offline while we begin investigating the situation,” added a separate Capstone spokesperson in a statement to the media.

“We are currently engaging all relevant parties to brief them on the situation and will provide more information when it becomes available.” 

No known cause for the failure is known at this early stage, however it remains baffling how a turbine hub could simply detach itself from the turbine.

The Erie Shores Wind Farm consists of 66 wind turbines from GE Vernova, which has suffered several turbine failures in recent months. Wind turbines have broken or failed at the 800MW Vineyard Wind project off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, Massachusetts, as well as at the first phase of the massive 3.6GW Dogger Bank project in the North Sea off the coast of the UK.

In Norway, damage to two turbine blades were detected by local energy company Aneo at its 130MW Sørmarkfjellet wind farm in the municipalities of Osen and Flatanger.

The Sørmarkfjellet wind farm, which began operations in 2021 and consists of 31 turbines from Danish wind turbine manufacturer Vestas, had already suffered damage to a wind turbine in January.

However, according to an update from Aneo, “several alarms were triggered in our monitoring systems at the Sørmarkfjellet wind farm” on March 15, after which a visual inspection confirmed that a turbine blade had been severely damaged and parts of it had fallen.

“On Sunday, it was discovered that there was also damage to an additional blade on the same turbine.”

“As the incident was not caused by extreme weather or other clear warnings, we have decided to close the entire wind farm to both the public and employees,” Aneo said in its statement.

“Power production has also been temporarily halted until we have clarified the cause of the incident.”

The Sørmarkfjellet wind farm also suffered damage to a separate turbine in January after a severe storm caused the wind farm to lose power due to Aneo’s inability to “control the turbines and adapt them to the strong winds.”

Afterwards, Aneo discovered that two of the turbines had significant damage to one blade each, and in the days afterwards, parts of the blades fell off the turbines.

Concerns remain that parts could continue to fall off the blades, leading to the closure of the wind farm and a warning to everyone to keep their distance.

“We are working to identify the cause of this incident and we will update this page with more information when it becomes available,” said Aneo.