Wind Turbines: Not Up to the Job, Literally

A frequent characteristic of central planning is an insistence on speed. Production must be pushed ahead! Targets must be hit! That the timetable makes no sense and may even damage the quality of what is being produced is almost never the concern it should be. This is especially true when the central planners decree, as they so often do, that there is a “crisis.” Indeed, that’s often their excuse for getting involved in the first place. As we all know (or should know) by now, good ol’ climate change has become the climate crisis, the climate emergency, or worse: Climate chaos! There is a “race,” we are told, to hit net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

This is the attitude that is likely to lead to disarray in the wake of the rollout of electric vehicles, and this is the attitude that has led to solar and wind energy being assigned primetime roles before they are ready for them.

Normally the problems associated with wind and solar relate to intermittency (the sun doesn’t always shine, and the wind doesn’t always blow), and the lack of scalable energy-storage capability, but, as this Bloomberg report indicates, when it comes to wind turbines, the pace of production has led to other, even more basic difficulties:

On a calm, sunny day last June, Mike Willey was feeding his cattle when he got a call from the local sheriff’s dispatcher. A motorist had reported that one of the huge turbines at a nearby wind farm had collapsed in dramatic fashion. Willey, chief of the volunteer fire department in Ames, 90 miles northwest of Oklahoma City, set out to survey the scene.

The steel tower, which once stood hundreds of feet tall, was buckled in half, and the turbine blades, whose rotation took the machine higher than the Statue of Liberty, were splayed across the wheat field below. The turbine, made by General Electric Co., had been in operation less than a year. “It fell pretty much right on top of itself,” Willey says.

Another GE turbine of the same model collapsed in Colorado a few days later. That wind farm’s owner-operator, NextEra Energy Inc., later attributed it to a blade flaw and said it and GE had taken steps to prevent future mishaps. A spokesperson for GE declined to say what went wrong in both cases in a statement to Bloomberg.

The instances are part of a rash of recent wind turbine malfunctions across the US and Europe, ranging from failures of key components to full collapses. Some industry veterans say they’re happening more often, even if the events are occurring at only a small fraction of installed machines. The problems have added hundreds of millions of dollars in costs for the three largest Western turbine makers, GE, Vestas Wind Systems and Siemens Energy’s Siemens Gamesa unit; and they could result in more expensive insurance policies—a potential setback for the push to abandon fossil fuels and fight climate change.

The race to add production lines for ever-bigger turbines is cited as a major culprit by people in the industry. “We’re seeing these failures happening in a shorter time frame on the newer turbines, and that’s quite concerning,” says Fraser McLachlan, chief executive officer of London-based GCube Underwriting Ltd., which insures about $3.5 billion in wind assets in 38 countries. If the failure rate keeps climbing, he says, insurance premiums could increase or new coverage limits could be imposed.

There’s no publicly available industrywide data on turbine failures, making it tough to paint a complete picture of changes in their performance over time. But Vestas and GE have said the shares of their machines in the field that are unable to produce power are elevated, even if it’s still a small proportion of their installed fleets. Siemens Energy revised its earnings outlook for 2023 downward this month, citing higher-than-expected costs caused by flaws in Siemens Gamesa’s installed turbines. . . .

Vestas Wind Systems A/S saw annual warranty provisions jump from roughly €600 million in 2019 to almost €1.2 billion in 2020 and 2021. The Danish company says the supply chain wasn’t ready to handle the pace of product introductions by manufacturers, which has contributed to project delays, cost increases and quality challenges. “We need a profitable and scalable wind industry to create a net-zero future, and this requires we continue to mature the entire value chain of renewables,” the company said in a statement.

GE, which reports fourth-quarter earnings on Jan. 24, took a $500 million charge in the third quarter to cover warranty costs and repairs on its turbines. The company has installed turbines capable of producing 40 gigawatts of wind power since 2017, introducing several more powerful machines along the way.

How big are the blades on some of the larger wind turbines?

As long as a football field.

Oh.