France: Watch a wind turbine catch fire and crash – IOTW Report

France: Watch a wind turbine catch fire and crash

CFP: Wind is normally good news for wind turbines, but the recent high winds brought by Storm Carmen was too much for one 260-tonne machine in western France.

There is only so much wind a wind turbine can take it seems.

At least that was the case for one in the Vendée, western France where a 62-metre high turbine was blown over by in fierce winds on January 1st.

The 260 tonne turbine was toppled in a field near the town of Bouin, where it had stood firmly for 13 years and survived numerous other storms.

The other turbines on the wind farm survived Storm Carmen, and specialists believe a mini-tornado may have been responsible for blowing over the unlucky turbine.  Video here

25 Comments on France: Watch a wind turbine catch fire and crash

  1. 13 years? The piece of junk was probably about to fail, anyway…

    “The analysis of almost 3,000 onshore wind turbines — the biggest study of its kind —warns that they will continue to generate electricity effectively for just 12 to 15 years…The wind energy industry and the Government base all their calculations on turbines enjoying a lifespan of 20 to 25 years.”

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/energy/windpower/9770837/Wind-farm-turbines-wear-sooner-than-expected-says-study.html

    Look for the rest of the wind farm to collapse fairly soon, from bad weather, which will be blamed on climate change. Maybe they’ll start allowing muslims to go directly to the source and blow up the windmills which power the cars they like to burn.

  2. Apparently it’s hard to provide safe shutdown of a spinning element if you can’t control the prime driving force. Kudos to the manufacturers for constructing the nacelles of fiberglass… they burn up REAL good!

  3. A couple months ago I drove by a wind patch and noticed a broken turbine. One of the blades was crumpled over by the root, near the hub. It was ominous looking and I wondered how the rest of the structure was intact. It had to go out of balance, but I saw no other outside damage to it.

  4. It must take a tremendous amount of fuel to get those things fired up and spinning fast enough to push the air around – much more proportionally than a ceiling fan, for instance. Still, we have to keep them running or we won’t be able to generate enough breeze to counteract the effects of man-made global warming. I mean, think of how many people would be dead of heat prostration today without them.

  5. I learned an interesting fact about wind turbines from someone who built them. They’re geared to a 16:1 ratio so for each revolution the inside mechanism turns sixteen times.

  6. There are many of those ugly windmills in my windy part of the country. They are supposed to have a brake to stop them in high winds but after 13 years that obviously failed. Wonderful-ugly windmills and prairie fires when they fail.

  7. The problem is that the blades and hubs
    have no counterbalance so there is EXTREME
    pressure on the bearings which are cooled
    by a forced oil bath.Any of the electronic
    systems that operate & control the oil bath fail.
    Well you have extreme friction, heat and then fire…

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