How an airborne blade exposed broader problems at PGE’s flagship wind farm
Aug. 27, 2022
In the waning days of January, a worker delivering fertilizer to a wheat farm in the rolling hills of Sherman County found some broken, industrial-size bolts on the ground near one of Portland General Electric’s towering wind turbines.
He was puzzled because it stood to reason the bolts fell from the machine. But he didn’t know if there was a problem or, if so, who to tell. So he picked up one, sent a snapshot to his co-worker, Kevin Massie, and used it as a paperweight while he documented the delivery.
Massie arrived a day or two afterward to tow a delivery driver whose vehicle got stuck in the mud near the same turbine at Biglow Canyon. It was dark and windy. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
Hours later, at 2:11 a.m. Feb. 1, one of the turbine’s three spinning blades launched into the night.
No one saw it. No one heard it. But it was evidently a violent affair.
The skinny blade, as tall as an 11-story building and weighing more than four Toyota Camrys, soared the full length of a football field. It plowed a furrow 4-feet deep in the wheat stubble where it eventually landed.
Heavy-duty bolts that once kept the blade fastened to the tower scattered around the turbine base like shrapnel, some spiked deep into the soil.
“Someone could have been killed or badly injured,” said Kathryn McCullough, whose husband, Kevin, farms under about half of Biglow Canyon’s turbines – including the one that lost its blade.
The broken bolts preceding the incident weren’t the only warning signs of problems at PGE’s flagship wind facility, which opened 15 years ago amid a push to expand green energy technology in Oregon and nationally. But it took the so-called “blade liberation” for PGE to take urgent action at Biglow Canyon, one of Oregon’s largest wind farms, shutting down all 217 turbines for testing and keeping some out of service for at least four months.
The dramatic episode in the rural landscape of the Columbia River Gorge represents a revealing, if concerning, inflection point in Oregon’s two-decade history with the ubiquitous turbines that help fuel clean energy.
Industry groups insist that wind farms are very safe and major malfunctions, such as blades flying off the turbines, are exceedingly rare. But as wind farms grow older and the underlying components age, regular and proactive maintenance become far more important.
More: Why accident, safety data is hard to come by for wind industry
Yet landowners have been raising concerns to PGE for the last decade about maintenance issues at Biglow Canyon and their impact on energy production at the facility. And an investigation by The Oregonian/OregonLive has found that the seemingly isolated blade incident is part of a wider set of maintenance problems and equipment failures that are now undercutting electricity generation at Biglow Canyon, shortchanging ratepayers and landowners, and putting those who cultivate crops under the turbines – and potentially their farmland itself – at risk.
Among the findings:
- PGE has failed to report public safety incidents at Biglow Canyon, in potential violation of its operating agreement with the state. The utility hasn’t disclosed incidents where hatches, metal disks and blade bolts have fallen off turbines from a height of about 265 feet. PGE has questioned whether such incidents meet the reporting threshold, but regulators insist even small objects may be a hazard to anyone near a turbine because they can reach almost 90 mph when falling.
- PGE knowingly operated at least four turbines at Biglow Canyon with broken blade bolts, in one case for nearly a year, maintenance records show. Those bolts clamp blades to the rotor and bear the stress of wind and motion. Research indicates that broken bolts, while not uncommon, can become a serious problem leading to catastrophic blade failures like the one in February.
- Oil leaks from Biglow Canyon’s wind turbines and transformers are environmental and fire hazards. The turbines have been plagued by leaks of oil and lubricants that coat towers and blades and spit on to their gravel pads and surrounding fields. Transformers have ruptured regularly, causing two fires and spilling about 3,000 gallons of mineral oil into surrounding soil that prompted expensive cleanups.
- The number of problems PGE has disclosed to regulators is out of line with other wind farms. Since 2011, PGE has reported more than a dozen oil spills and other incidents at Biglow Canyon with the potential to affect public safety — about three times more than any other wind farm regulated by the state. But state officials only recently began pressing PGE to explain those troubles.
- Biglow Canyon has generated far less power than PGE originally projected. The availability of its Vestas wind turbines to produce energy has abruptly declined in recent years, and the project’s rate of energy production is less than neighboring wind farms of comparable age.
- Ratepayers may end up footing the bill for assets that are no longer useful. The project’s 76 turbines manufactured by Vestas are halfway through their projected life but PGE is already considering replacing them. If that happens by the end of 2023, ratepayers would be stuck covering $156 million in remaining costs.
The Biglow Canyon turbine that launched its blade is one of about 72,000 machines nationwide, including some 2,300 turbines in Oregon, which has more production capacity than all but nine other states. Yet there is no effective national, state or county reporting requirement or database tracking safety or operational incidents at wind farms, and only 13 of the largest of Oregon’s 48 wind farms are regulated by the state, numbers that include multiple phases of some projects.
PGE launched an investigation into this winter’s blade throw and is filing written updates to…
Read More:Wind Bust: How an airborne blade exposed broader problems at PGE’s flagship wind farm :: The Oregonian/OregonLive
2022-08-27 14:01:19
