Offshore Wind Blade Not Too Large To Fail

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Offshore Wind Blades Testing And Certification

Not too big to fail

Climate activists have renewable energy goals to be met by 2025 and 2030. The main goal is carbon neutrality by 2050.

The world's biggest companies, investors, cities, and regions have combined forces to push local and state governments to increase their 2025 climate goals. The pressure is on and big mistakes can happen.

To reach these renewable goals fossil fuel plants are shut down with massive ocean wind projects taking up the slack. The bigger the megawatt wind turbine the more chance of attaining the renewable energy goals. The newly installed ocean turbines are over 800 feet tall with 350-foot blades.

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There was nowhere in the world available to test a 350-foot blade. The Massachusetts site could only test a blade up to 300 feet. To test the prototype blade they had to cut more than 50 feet off the blade and more than likely place weight on the cut-off end to make up for the missing blade section.

Engineers have to extrapolate the figures from the 300-foot section to the 350-foot section. The blade made it through the tests and was certified.

Several of these 350-foot blades in service have failed off Nantucket and Europe.
These blades are so large, they oscillate in the wind. The tips of the blades travel around in a circle over 700 feet wide. The wind speeds at the top are much higher than at the bottom. The result is constantly varying speeds.

The result of a blade break around 50 feet from the rotor or center of the turbine could be what is called classic torsional fatigue.

These 350-foot large blades are made in a fiberglass shell and lack expensive reinforcing carbon fiber. At least one blade should have been tested in a NASA wind tunnel before mass production.
In 1997 there was a warning from LM Glasfiber of Denmark, following several instances of stress cracks appearing on blades subjected to violent edgewise oscillation.

The damage from edgewise oscillation has amounted to serious longitudinal cracks on the trailing edge of the blade several yards from the root. The root is the structure holding the outer part of the blade to the rotor or center

One blade before 1997 oscillated so much it hit the tower causing the blade to break and fall to the ground. The cure was to install vibration detectors to avoid acute blade damage.

The oscillation problem has been known for more than 25 years. It occurs on all wind turbine blades but increases with their length and weight.

The oscillation can start with blade stiffness, temperature, and wind gusts. Why install the new 13-megawatt ocean wind turbines without the vibration detectors?

The 350-foot blades required a lot of financing, but they are so big that they may fail without carbon fiber reinforcing.

Note# For years the wind industry denied wind turbine infra-sound. The US Dept of Energy was aware of the infra-sound from a Mod 1 wind turbine in Boone, North Carolina in 1985.

# Note: Massachusetts is testing 350-foot blades in the 300-foot test site. Removed more than fifty feet off the blade to test inside the test site: Extrapolation used to compare test results

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Massachusetts 300-foot test site

A lot of this wind crap started with Merkel and her off-the-charts-costly ENERGIEWENDE

Merkel has a PhD in Physics.
She knew better, but she allowed herself to be pushed by leftist, Socialist know-nothings into closing nuclear plants, promote the ENERGIEWENDE, and allow millions of unskilled, third world, from God knows where, to enter Germany and create all sorts of unrest in staid Germany.
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I lived in Germany for three years in the 1950s
I find it unrecognizable to-day
Van der Liar wants to make it worse, not just Germany, but all of Europe
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When I lived there, GUEST workers (haha) from Türkiye were brought in to do low-skilled factory work.
But the German women, at that time, did not want to go out with them, so they demanded Muslim virgin child brides to be sent from Türkiye
But that was not enough, the whole extended family, on both sides, came as well.
Then the issue arose, where do we go to church.
They demanded Islam churches and Sharia Law
Word got around, Germany was a rich sap, come on down by the millions. etc.
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I warned my uncles/aunts and cousins and they laughed at me.
They are crying in their beer now!
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A repeat of that disaster in the US can be avoided, by electing Trump by a landslide to MAGA
Obama, Clinton, Biden, Harris, Walz, etc., should not be anywhere near the the US government, to stop the weaponizing of the government
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Tim Walz’s Own Brother, Jeff Walz, Considers Joining Forces with Trump, Slams Governor as ‘Unfit to Make Decisions About Your Future’
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In the 1950, the ratio of adult women to men was 4 to 1, due to Germany losing soldiers by the millions in WW2.
It was sheer stupidity and short-sightedness of Germany’s leadership to cement Germany’s downfall by inviting GUEST workers from Türkiye
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With too long rotor blades having torsional failures, the end of large wind turbines is near.
12 MW units have torsional failures of blades in the North Sea and near Cape Cod.
3 to 6 MW wind turbines are not viable, except in the windiest areas.
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Nuclear has to take its place
However, that is a problem, because of scare-mongering and woke-isms, almost all of the world’s nuclear sector is totally dominated by Russia, China and Korea.
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The West is a distant second
Hinkley in the U.K. and the French plant in Finland have huge over-runs, and many years of schedule delays, because incompetence is piled onto woke idiocy.