Posted by Frank Haggerty on October 24, 2024 at Nantucket Offshore Wind Turbines Lack Torsion Testing – Citizens’ Task Force on Wind Power – Maine
General Electric owns LM Wind Company as a holding company. In 2019 they designed a new hybrid 351-foot-long blade made with much less expensive carbon fiber than the competition and easy to manufacture.
To build 150 blades in Gaspee, Quebec, a prototype blade had to be certified at the 300-foot Massachusetts Clean Energy Center Wind Technology Test Facility in Charlestown, Massachusetts. Engineers cut the new blade in two parts and assumed the data to test it.
The MassCEC WTTC never performed a torsion test, as the test site was too small.
LM Wind Company manufactured 150 blades for Vineyard Wind Company off Nantucket.
LM Wind Company in 1997 was LM Glassfiber of Denmark. LM warned their wind turbine blades had stress cracks from violent edgewise oscillation and requested vibration detectors be placed on the turbines.
An example of blade bending due to oscillation is a wind turbine 835 feet high with a blade 351 feet long is blades travel in a circle over 700 feet. The wind speed at the top of the circle could be 30 miles an hour and fog at the bottom of the circle.
The weak blade result is the blade can bend enough for the tip to hit the tower or bend to break off near the wind turbine generator similar to the Nantucket wind blade.
On July 13, 2024, a 351-foot blade made by LM Wind Company cracked sending up to 60 tons of microplastics, fiberglass, and balsa wood over the East Coast.