FINDLAY, Ohio — Three months ago, a wind turbine at the One Energy wind campus in Findlay lost a blade.
Now, the company says it knows what happened and is restarting energy production.
One Energy CEO Jereme Kent says his team has been busy checking every piece of equipment, using third party labs and research groups and even going over the damaged bolts with an electron microscope since one of the company's newer turbines threw a blade on Jan. 22.
"So that's where we had to do a comprehensive analysis top to bottom, don't rule out anything, start back from the basics," Kent said. "Work through all of the scenarios of what is the actual 'why' behind all of it. That's what took time and that's what we wanted to make sure was done right."
Kent says a small anomaly was discovered in the flange of the failed blade that didn't fit tight enough within the connection.
"That shifted a lot of load from the flange to the bolts, and, so, the bolts were fatiguing faster because they were getting higher loads than they were supposed to," Kent said. "We're talking about super small gaps. Fractions of a millimeter."
He said the company believes the flange issue was a one-time problem, but is inspecting all of its turbines to ensure the issue won't happen again.
One Energy is also systematically going through and replacing every single bolt on every single blade of their turbines and installing new devices, which look similar to washers, that indicate when a bolt is properly installed.
Kent says in his 20-year wind turbine career, he's never experienced this kind of blade failure, which is why he wanted his company to be transparent with its investigation and repair process to the public and wants to share his findings with the rest of the industry.
"We're doing a lot of things the industry doesn't do normally, that are not standard practice, that we learned make an investigation, make finding a problem in comparing things across turbines much easier," he said. "We have a bunch of lessons learned, and we hope everybody else gets to see them as well."
The remaining wind turbines are being reactivated as each is inspected and cleared for use.
The damaged turbine will still take many months to repair.