A Vestas V112 3MW turbine has collapsed at Stena Renewable’s 96MW Lemnhult wind farm in Sweden.
The company said the machine failed during the morning of 24 December and that the wind farm’s other 31 turbines were shut down immediately as a precaution.
No one was injured in the incident, a technical investigation is underway and local authorities and other stakeholders have been briefed.
“It is not currently known how long the investigation will take,” said Stena.
Oil spilled during the accident is being cleaned up and “there is no signficant risk of environmental damage”, added the company.
A spokesperson for Vestas said: “Service technicians and technology experts have been on site together with the customer’s operational experts and have begun the process of determining what caused the incident.”
He added that incidents involving structural integrity are very rare. “We have not experienced a megawatt-class turbine collapsing before. The main priority at this point is to determine the root cause.
“We will need to await more definitive results from metallurgical and other tests before being able to determine the cause.”
Local reports said the accident took place at around 9am with fire crews attending that afternoon.
Lemnhult was built staring in 2012 with full operations kicking off in 2013.
A third-party video image of the felled turbine has been posted online.
Image: a Vestas V112 (Vestas)
