- The number of turbine breakdowns around the world is going up. Sometimes the blades fall off or the whole turbine falls apart.
- A new report says that production problems may be to blame for the mysterious rise in failures.
- Quality control plans are getting smaller while turbines are getting bigger.
The windmills fall harder the higher they are. And they are falling for sure.
According to a story from Bloomberg, the number of wind turbine failures is going up everywhere from Oklahoma to Sweden to Colorado to Germany. All three of the major manufacturers admit that the race to make bigger turbines has led to manufacturing problems.
All over the world, turbines that are higher than 750 feet are falling down. The tallest one, which will fall in September 2021 in Germany and is 784 feet tall, is the tallest of all. To give you an idea of how tall these turbines are, the Space Needle in Seattle and the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C. are both shorter than these turbines. The Statue of Liberty is around the same height as even the smaller turbines that recently collapsed in Oklahoma, Wisconsin, Wales, and Colorado.
General Electric, Vestas, and Siemens Gamesa, the three biggest companies in the field, are all seeing a drop in turbine sales. Why? The GE CEO, Larry Culp, reportedly noted on an earnings call in October of last year that “it takes moment to stabilize the manufacturing and quality on these new products.””Fast innovation puts stress on manufacturing and the supply chain as a whole.”
Without industry-wide data on the rise and now fall of turbines, we depend on experts in the field to point out the problems with wind farming. “These failures are happening on the new turbines in a shorter amount of time,” Fraser McLachlan, CEO of insurance company GCube Underwriting, told Bloomberg. That is really unsettling.
The need to build larger wind turbines has accelerated the manufacturing of these expanding devices. Bloomberg says that Siemens has had trouble with quality control on a new design, Vestas has had problems with project delays and quality, and GE has seen a rise in the cost of repairs and guarantee costs. And all of this comes with problems in the supply chain and changing prices for materials.
The biggest turbines can reach heights of more than 850 feet and have blades that are 300 feet long. As the size of the turbine goes up, so does its ability to collect energy. But the bigger the engine, the more things that can go wrong, and the farther it falls.
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