Will Hurricanes Topple U.S. Wind Turbines? – NYTimes.com

As plans for wind farms rising out of the ocean along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts inch closer to fruition, a new study from Carnegie Mellon University suggests that hurricanes could destroy a significant number of turbines in some of these areas, even coming close to wiping them out.

Bloomberg News

Although turbines are designed to both harness and withstand the forces of wind, they can be severely damaged by too much of it. In the United States, Europe and Asia, turbines have caught fire, blades have shredded and towers have crumpled when hit by stormy gales.

The authors of the study, published on Monday in the National Academy of Sciences magazine PNAS, set out to quantify the likelihood that a hurricane could topple towers in American waters where projects are under consideration or development.

They looked what might happen to 50-turbine farms off the coasts of four states: North Carolina, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Texas. Feeding historical data about hurricane occurrence and intensity into a probabilistic model, they simulated potential damage to the turbine towers over several 20-year periods and then took an average.