World’s most powerful wind turbine sees its typhoon-proof blades break in China

The world’s largest single-capacity wind turbine, located off the coast of China, recently experienced a blade failure during testing. Multiple blades reportedly broke off while the turbine was still spinning, though no injuries have been recorded as a result of the incident.

This massive piece of renewable energy infrastructure was built by Mingyang. The company is China’s largest private wind turbine manufacturer.

Workers installed the turbine in late August and it’s capable of producing 20 megawatts of electricity. This capacity is sufficient to offset the annual carbon footprint of 96,000 people.

The turbine is said to have the ability to endure winds exceeding 178 miles per hour. The machine previously withstood a super typhoon earlier this year.

According to developers, the blade breakage occurred under “extreme, abnormal conditions” during a test designed to simulate rare, severe circumstances. They explained the turbine’s blades exceeded their design load limit during the trial, leading to the failure.

The company said such testing is essential to refining this clean energy technology, even if the scenarios being emulated have a low probability of occurring in the real-world.

“We will continue to conduct further in-depth research on the product’s adaptability under these low-probability conditions,” Mingyang said in a statement. “The turbine was being tested under extreme conditions, a process that is crucial to ensuring that our newly developed models meet high standards and high reliability.”

Although the turbine is operationally the most powerful globally, it remains a prototype. Mingyang emphasized that the testing, while rigorous, is an important step toward making their final product “superior, safer and more reliable.” The company intends to use data from this incident to make improvements to the turbine’s design.