A Vestas turbine at a MidAmerican Vitality-owned wind farm in Adair County, Iowa, caught hearth Tuesday in dramatic footage captured by native newscasts.
The 2MW Vestas V110 turbine was positioned in service on the 310MW Arbor Hill Wind Farm, which makes use of 2MW and 4MW nameplate capability generators.
Native hearth brigades from Adair and surrounding cities responded however may do little as they lacked tools to succeed in the nacelle. Turbine hub heights on the Arbor Hill array reportedly attain 95 metres.
The fireplace finally consumed the nacelle and one of many blades, with burning particles falling into surrounding cornfields that despatched up plumes of smoke that might be seen for miles.
“We’re very lucky that this subject had already been harvested,” Adair County emergency supervisor Robert Kempf instructed native media, in any other case the fireplace may have unfold far past the one turbine.
The turbine hearth stopped burning at round 1500 US central time, and there have been no accidents.
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Geoff Greenwood, communications director for MidAmerican, mentioned: “Security is our highest precedence. We’re working with the fireplace division and can work with the turbine producer, Vestas-American Wind Expertise, to find out what occurred.” The method will embrace a root trigger evaluation.
A spokesperson for Vestas instructed Recharge: “As soon as the turbine has been deemed secure to entry, Vestas will work with the shopper to find out the basis trigger.”
Greenwood confirmed a small variety of generators on the identical circuit are presently offline, “however the the rest of the wind farm is working usually”.
“An incident similar to that is a particularly uncommon incidence,” Greenwood mentioned.
That is the second incident at a MidAmerican-owned wind farm in Iowa this yr.
In February, a blade separated from the hub of a Siemens Gamesa 2.3MW turbine on the firm’s Lundgren, Iowa mission earlier than touchdown in a subject, MidAmerican instructed Recharge at the moment.
No-one was injured and there was no harm to tools on the 250MW array.
MidAmerican, a part of the Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate whose CEO is billionaire Warren Buffett, in 2020 halted varied Vestas generators after blade incidents that it linked to built-in lightning safety techniques.
