jeez thats amazing...
i guess thats one reason not to mount em on your house.
look at how that one blade hits the pole and then the whole thing just splits off from every blade, wow....

Yow, that's scary! I like wind power, but, uh, maybe we really don't want the turbines near developed areas. Anyone know what the failure rate for turbines is? I'd be very interested to see that.

I fear that this video will just give wind power opponents more ammunition.

Back in the 1970's, I had built a four blade six foot diameter wind turbine and was testing it in a strong breeze. At about three or four hundred r.p.m., a blade hit the pole and the whole thing exploded, spraying a mass of wood splinters for hundreds of yards in one direction. Fortunately, I was standing on the other side and was unscathed. I could have lost my life. Happily, it did not dampen my enthusiasm for wind energy.
Was I thirty years ahead of my time, or have we been deplorably slow to embrace this beautiful technology?

There are all kinds of ways to know long in advance when a turbine is failing. usually they can fix them, but in this case I guess they couldn't and just let it fail.

How many peoples lives are lost each year in coal mining or oil drilling. One, albeit impressive, failure of a wind turbine should not put anyone off wind power.

They will shake out the weak manufacturers over the next twenty years. A wind turbine should stand up to a 2 minute 100 mph gust without damage, IMO.

That was cool. Goes to show just how much energy there is in the wind...

I agree with anonymous that they must have known about the impending failure, otherwise they wouldn't have had a camera pointed at it in a wind storm...

During the massive speed up before the explosion, it probably generated enough power to build a new one ;)

We have 493 wind mills in the Southern Alberta and I have only heard of one loosing its blades and not damaging the tower. That over a lot of years but there adding wind mills ever year.

I hope this is footage from an overspeed test and just not properly attributed. Seems suspicious to have that camera hard mounted and fixed on the windmill. Is that the actual soundtrack?

Even if it was a broken or defective machine, it's hard to believe that the variable pitch mechanism couldn't feather the blades, the yaw mech couldn't move the disc parallel to the wind, and the brake couldn't hold. And then the weather hit. A perfect storm.

Having worked for a major jet engine manufacturer, it reminds me of the "blade out" imbalance and bird digestion test films. Scary when rotating machinery comes apart. Not as scary as Chernobyl, but still . . .

Bram: A similar thought was going through my mind; how much juice is that thing putting out just before it goes Kablam! Those blades are just roaring away!

I'd rather this fail than a nuclear plant.

A very clean accident; plus a residential unit is much smaller.

Dona Tracey cut the brake cable :)

It's gotta be a test. Why else would a camera be pointed at the tower just as it's blowing apart?

"It's gotta be a test. Why else would a camera be pointed at the tower just as it's blowing apart?"

Probably because they knew for a little while that the brakes were broken -- they just couldn't repair them with these kinds of winds. What else to do but enjoy the show? ;)

This demonstrates the beauty of distributed energy - problems can be worked out with contained consequences. In the worst-case, this would have been nearer a home, and we would have learnt the lesson with merely the inconvence of evacuation and property damage.

As it is, the most modern coal continues to kill daily and we are still struggling for the next generation to fix those problems.

And thank god we made it through nuclear problems so that failure in nuclear now just means it gets cold and stops working. (Another life-threatening situation if you live in a cold-winter cimate)

This is clearly a failure test - there are two videos available of exactly the same incident- both from fixed cameras, shot from different angles - I hardly think two videos just 'happened' to be tripod mounted and focussed on the turbine when it collapsed!

Kinda scary looking when it's goin' that fast...also, call me crazy but I thought the way the turbine collapsed was hilarious.

I was looking at the wind turbines near Lincoln, NE and there is a little sign up with facts about the windmills. The blades are, I think 76 feet in length and turn at a max of 2 RPM (which is pretty slow). For fun, I crunched the numbers and found that the tips, at 2 RPM, are going about 159MPH. I have no idea how fast or how big that one in the video is, but... wow. At least it looks like the blades broke up enough so that they'd slow down... I've *heard* (and it might be an urban legend, but it was from someone who worked as an engineer for a power company) of a blade that flew off intact and skewered a semi trailer. Yikes!

I didn't mean 2 rpm, I meant 30rpm... I was thinking 1 revolution every 2 seconds :)