At the beginning of August, a 45-meter-long rotor blade of a wind turbine in Lower Austria fell from a height of around 100 meters onto a field. EVN has now announced that the incident had occurred due to a chain of several unusual errors.
The rotor blade damage that occurred on August 7th in a wind farm in Glinzendorf could not have been foreseen. Barely visible corrosion in the bores of the blade bearing has therefore led to the screw connection being weakened.
In order to register such damage, special early detection monitoring systems are installed in the systems. These lead to the system being switched off before damage occurs. In addition to the damage to the blade bearing in Glinzendorf, the monitoring systems did not pass the error signal on to the turbine control due to a malfunction.
All identical systems have been checked by experts for possible corrosion damage and malfunctions in the monitoring systems since the incident. According to EVN, no similar damage was found.
The repair work on the defective wind turbine is now nearing completion. As the last step, a new rotor blade will now be installed, according to a broadcast on Sunday.