187 Ton Windmill Just Falls Down

Fire up the generator. Photo credit The Post Standard

Talk about tilting at windmills. This wind mill tilted, and then fell down. For no apparent reason.

The Syracuse Post Standard reported:

Fenner, NY — Marvin DeKing already was up and awake between 3 and 4 a.m. when he heard a loud bang.

“It sounded like thunder and lightning,” said DeKing, of 5206 Buyea Road in this rural town five miles northeast of Cazenovia. But it wasn’t until daylight that DeKing learned what had caused the noise: The 187 ton windmill across the road from his house had fallen over and lay sprawled in the cornfield in which it had stood.

The 200-foot-plus structure is one of 20 windmills that generate electricity at the Fenner Wind Farm operated by Enel North America.

Officials from Enel’s headquarters in Massachusetts began arriving in Fenner around 3 p.m. to begin investigating the incident.

“I don’t think we have any idea what happened at this point,” company spokesman Hank Sennott said.

The company will conduct a thorough investigation into the “highly unusual occurrence,” he said. He said he does not think there’s any possibility sabotage caused the windmill to topple.

Sennott said he believes this is the only one of Enel’s 260 turbines in the United States and Canada to fall. He estimated the replacement cost at $2 million to $3 million.

It’s unlikely that high winds knocked over the windmill. Winds gust up to 31 mph were recorded at 1:30 p.m. Saturday in nearby Hamilton, about 17 miles away, but then died down, said Dave Nicosia, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Binghamton. By 3 a.m., the winds in Hamilton were 10 mph, with gusts up to 17 mph.

The location of the windmill is a bit higher than Hamilton, NY. But still, the winds in Fenner were only estimated to be about 40 mph. Also, the rest of the wind farm was taken down. So, if anyone was relying on that wind farm to generate electricity after the windmill came crashing down, they would have been out of luck. Yet windmills are supposed to be a model for the future of America’s energy?

I have nothing against windmills, especially when private money is used to build windmills. But let’s not invest any more taxpayer funds into something that comes crashing down for no apparent reason.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 27th, 2009 at 9:38 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.