Introduction Nearly every utility-scale wind turbine built today has three blades. This was not inevitable. One-blade and two-blade machines were built and fielded in the 1980s and 1990s, and multi-blade rotors dominated the farm windmill era for a century. The three-blade configuration won a genuine… Read more
Introduction In the predawn hours of June 29, 2026, a severe thunderstorm complex swept across central South Dakota. The South Dakota Mesonet station at Highmore, in Hyde County, recorded a straight-line wind gust of 131 mph (58.6 m/s) at about 6:15–6:25 a.m. local time. The… Read more
Two incidents at the same wind farm, seven weeks apart, tell a single engineering story that’s worth unpacking carefully. On February 2, 2026, an 80-meter Vestas turbine at the Yeongdeok wind farm in North Gyeongsang Province, South Korea, snapped roughly a third of the way… Read more