Well.

This is not good.

Wind turbines in Schuyler County, Missouri, seem to be having problems remaining upright. This happened Sunday morning.

It happened off of State Highway O in Schuyler County, about three miles east of Queen City, near the Ameren Missouri High Prairie substation.

The call came into the Schuyler County Sheriff's Office just after 7:30 a.m.

The reporting party said they heard a loud boom just before making the call to authorities.

There are no reports of any injuries and no other details at this time as to what caused the turbine to collapse.

And I used the plural on purpose because, as I looked around for more information, there were more turbines in Schuyler County that had either gone over or had chunks fly off onto the deck below.

This turbine came down in April in the same county and is owned by the same company.

A wind turbine came crashing down in Schuyler County late last week.

It happened Friday night on Fairview Drive off County Route J in Queen City.

It was part of Ameren's wind farm along Highway 63 that was installed in 2021.

Several viewers messaged KTVO with pictures, saying they could see the tower without its face or blades from the highway.

It seems that one was enough for the company to take them all offline and try to figure out why they were blowing apart.

All wind turbines in Adair and Schuyler counties have been temporarily turned off while Ameren tries to figure out why the entire top of one turbine fell to the ground late last week and was destroyed.

KTVO is now learning more following pieces of that wind turbine that came crashing down in Schuyler County.

Apparently, they didn't figure out what was wrong because not four months later it's happened again. It does seem like they've got an ongoing problem, particularly for relatively brand-new turbines.

...Both are part of Ameren's wind farm near U.S. Highway 63 that was installed in 2021.

If that were my field the farm was leasing and my cattle underneath, I might start to be concerned - ask some probing questions and go over my lease paperwork, particularly the liability part, with my lawyer.

This awkward situation on land isn't the only lather, rinse, repeat wind turbine problem in the news...or actually out of it because you do have to go looking.

That Vineyard Wind massive offshore blade failure causing all the trouble for Nantucket and surrounding states' beaches? GE, the Vernova blade manufacturer, acknowledged that it was a manufacturing flaw that caused the MA blade to delaminate and basically shred itself. This had also happened previously to another blade at a British wind farm called Dogger Bank, and both had been put together at the same Canadian facility. 

GE was going to get right on checking out those blades they had in service for potential fatal flaws.

...Within a few days, GE did quietly admit that a "manufacturing flaw" in the blade was responsible for the failure. To emphasize how big the impact is, now they have to go check about 150 other already manufactured and installed blades, you know, just in case any of those didn't have enough glue either.

A manufacturing flaw led to a turbine blade failure at the Vineyard Wind offshore project off the coast of Massachusetts this month, the part's producer, GE Vernova (GEV.N), opens new tab, said on Wednesday.

The turbine blade broke on July 13 and left potentially dangerous debris on beaches on the island of Nantucket. U.S. authorities later ordered a shutdown of the project, which is still under construction.

GE Vernova said a preliminary analysis had determined that insufficient bonding led to the breakage, adding its quality assurance program should have identified the issue.

I guess the inspection teams weren't quick enough getting their bags packed.

Another GE Vernova blade fails. In the shadow of the Revolution Wind incident, another GE Vernova Haliade-X turbine has failed at Dogger Bank wind farm offshore England. https://t.co/sc7xq6zWxw pic.twitter.com/es3KbwxQDe

— RenewableEnergyWorld (@REWorld) August 23, 2024

Well...huh. It's unclear if this blade was made in Canada or France.

The offshore wind industry is waking up to more disheartening news- another GE Vernova turbine blade has failed, this one off the northeast coast of England.

The failure occurred Thursday morning on an installed GE Vernova’s Haliade-X turbine at Dogger Bank A offshore wind farm, a joint venture between SSE Renewables (40%), Equinor (40%), and Vårgrønn (20%), which is currently under construction. “No one was injured or in the vicinity at the time the damage was sustained,” reads a brief statement on the project’s website.

The surrounding marine area has been restricted and authorities have been notified of the incident. GE Vernova has initiated an investigation into the cause of the blade failure, which is the second to occur at the Dogger Bank Wind Farm. In fact, if you just manually delete the “2” at the end of the URL linking you to the statement above, you’ll find a very similar statement from the previous incident back in May.

This news has made the growing opposition to offshore wind - and the Vineyard Wind project in particular - from formerly earnest blue-voting, tree-hugging supporters even more determined to fight it off.

...This latest incident is likely to stoke local opposition to offshore wind, which was galvanized by last month’s failure at Vineyard Wind. On Sunday, about two dozens commercial and recreational fishing vessels flying anti-offshore wind flags steamed to the site of the crippled turbine to protest the continued offshore wind development and its impacts on the marine ecosystem. Organizers of the event, most of whom are commercial fishermen, said they had long been opposed to offshore wind but plans to stage the protest kicked into gear after learning of the blade collapse and the debris it left floating and scattered across beaches and fishing grounds.

“The blade collapse was an eye-opener to a lot of people who before didn’t know that offshore wind was a disaster for the ocean,” said Shawn Machie, 54, who is captain of the New Bedford scallop boat F/V Captain John.

Machie led the brigade of fishing boats in tight loops around the broken turbine, which was guarded by another New Bedford scallop boat contracted to protect it from transient vessel traffic.

“It’s a shame it took this long, and something as drastic as this, to bring attention to the damage caused by offshore wind,” he said. “And they are still going full steam ahead.”

It doesn't hurt that wind industry henchmen are showing their true colors during citizen meetings. This is an acquaintance of Sen Sheldon Whitehouse getting all hands-on with a wind opponent.

WEIRD: A guy who lost control at an offshore wind farm forum in Rhode Island was also featured on Democrat Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse’s website.

Read about it here: https://t.co/l0p9rn8dWC pic.twitter.com/eQiSW4Uds2

— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) August 22, 2024

Thankfully, the goon's facing assault charges.

The towers planned right now for the East Coast are enormous, and I haven't seen the stats for the floating turbines they want for the Pacific. But the newest turbines planned for off-shore projects in the UK are mind-numbingly huge - obscenely so. And will cover hundreds of square miles of ocean.

HUNDREDS

...The low energy density of wind and sun means that extremely large collection devices are needed – enormous wind turbines with large blades, vast areas of solar panels. It is necessarily a capital-intensive and very expensive system.

A concrete example will make this clear. The 1,400 Megawatts (MW) Sophia Offshore Wind Farm on the Dogger Bank is currently under construction and will cover an area of nearly 600 square kilometres (it would just about fit into Middlesex). It is one of many major wind installations that the government is intending to drive through in its ambition to quadruple offshore capacity. We currently produce about 15 Gigawatts (GW) of operational offshore wind power. To meet this quadrupling of capacity, we would need around 30 more Sophia Offshore wind farms.

The Sophia will use the Siemens Gamesa SG 14-222 DD, one of the largest wind turbines on the market, with a generating capacity of 14 MW. It has three blades 108m in length, each weighing 65 tonnes. The nacelle, the box containing the generator at the top of the tower, weighs 500 tonnes, which Siemens proudly describes as a lightweight machine. Compared to other brands, this may even be true.

The overall height of the turbine is 252m, only 60m short of Britain’s tallest building, the Shard. It foundations will, according to Sophia’s own publicity, be 80 to 90m in length and weigh 1,200 to 1,400 tonnes each. The total weight of each turbine – blades, nacelle, tower and foundations – is likely to be nudging towards 3,000 tonnes.

Sofia will use 100 of these structures, so we can estimate that the wind farm alone accounts for about 300,000 tonnes of industrial equipment, mostly steel, some concrete, and fibre-glass reinforced epoxy in the blades. (For reference, a Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carrier weighs a mere 65,000 tonnes.) And this is before we have taken into account the offshore substations and the cables connecting each turbine and the shoreline.

Multiply all this by 30 to meet the government’s offshore wind targets, and you arrive at nine million tons of industrial equipment for the additional offshore installations alone. For scale, recall that the UK’s total annual production of steel is only six million tons, and you can begin to appreciate the magnitude of Ed Miliband’s plans for the country. This Wind and Sun King makes Louis XIV lookhumble.

Holy smokes.

HOLY SMOKES

And there was one more little nugget of information I learned about these massive abominations where none should be, and I really thought about it when I read of the fishermen's defiant boat parade around the Vineyard Wind towers.

Good luck if they have to try to find you, God forbid you go missing anywhere near one of these things.

...The government-sponsored studies for new marine radar systems to overcome the problems of false or hidden signals caused by reflections from wind turbines. So far, none has been successful.   

In the U.S., the radar interference issue emerged when Cape Wind was proposed and the potential of its wind turbines to disrupt the radar of neighboring military bases became a concern.  The initial solution was to propose a huge vessel exclusionary area around the 24-square-mile wind farm.  In 2007, the Missile Defense Agency of the Department of Defense (DoD) conducted a study: “Wind Turbine Analysis for Cape Cod Air Force Station Early Warning Radar and Beale Air Force Base Upgraded Early Warning Radar.”  The conclusion was: “Utility class wind farms could have a significant impact on radars, including the missile defense early warning radars…”  

...When the Minerals Management Service issued the final environmental impact statement for Cape Wind in 2008, the DoD’s “significant” concern was downgraded to “moderate” enabling the wind farm to be approved.   

The issue has not gone away as the Coast Guard has noted that radar interference will prevent it from conducting search-and-rescue operations within wind farms.  Given the size of proposed East Coast wind farms, substantial areas where commercial and sport fishing is done, and where commercial ships and pleasure boats transit, the loss of the Coast Guard’s ability to operate in fulfillment of its mission is unacceptable.   

...Surprisingly, the Secretary of the Interior had already approved the project.  What did that mean for the regular approval process?  This episode confirms how political offshore wind is.  First the Obama administration and now the Biden administration.   

As East Coast offshore wind projects have moved through BOEM’s approval process, we learned the Coast Guard cannot perform search-and-rescue operations within them because of maritime radar interference.  Coast Guard ships cannot travel within wind farms because their radar does not allow discrimination between real and false signals of other vessels increasing collision risk.  Additionally, the Coast Guard cannot use low-flying helicopters in wind farms to search for missing vessels or people. 

That's before one even gets to the part about some of these towers being built 500+ feet above the FAA standards for air traffic.

...The Atlantic Shores Offshore Wind turbines stand 1,057 feet tall, 548 feet above the FAA standard.  The wind turbines of Empire Offshore Wind are 952 feet tall, 453 feet above the allowed height.  According to the standard, any offshore wind turbine 499 feet or less tall is not an obstruction for FAA radar and visual flight rules in guiding planes in and out of airports.

HOLY SMOKES

I don't know about you, but this is the sort of information that people need to have access to. 

Sadly, there are only a few brave, inquisitive souls doing the digging AND the math, and it is ever so hard to find it.

That Green grifting Kool-Aid jug is wide, deep, and persuasive.

And very, very effective at burying bad news.