Twisted by the wind: A wind turbine has collapsed in Brandenburg

A wind turbine that collapsed in the Elbe-Elster district is puzzling green energy experts across Germany. It collapsed at a height of 30 meters. That shouldn't actually happen.

If a wind turbine falls over in Brandenburg , it will be like the famous sack of rice in China - you might think. After all, it is not without reason that the state has been awarded several times by lobby groups such as the Agency for Renewable Energies for its particularly wind power-friendly policy. Many thousands of wind turbines are turning in Brandenburg. But now it has really happened - and is causing a stir among experts nationwide.

Last Wednesday at around 3:15 p.m., the tower of the medium-sized facility in Koßdorf, a district of Mühlberg (Elbe-Elster), is said to have broken in half at a height of around 30 meters. The upper 40 meters, including the nacelle and the 24-meter-long rotor blades, fell off. Now around 90 tons of scrap metal are scattered across a field. The timing is already puzzling: Storm "Billie" only reached its peak on Friday afternoon, i.e. 48 hours later.

The expert Jürgen Holzmüller, who was specially called in from Aurich in East Frisia, has not yet allowed himself to be carried away by speculation. He simply stated: "This doesn't happen every day."

This harsh, Frisian analysis is confirmed by Munich Re in Bavaria, one of the largest reinsurance companies in the world. The company was one of the first to offer insurance policies specifically for wind turbines. "This usually involves fires in the nacelles. Even a rotor blade can break off," says Munich Re spokesman Stefan Straub. His colleagues in the company are not aware of any towers ever being torn down.

Such a wind turbine only pays for itself after 13 years

"Yes, it has happened before: in Hesse," corrects Markus Kellner from Regensburg, already slightly annoyed by the number of callers. As managing director of Windpark Koßdorf GmbH, he is most interested in investigating the cause. Kellner operates the wind farm on behalf of a few private individuals from Upper Palatinate. In 1999, they invested around 1.4 million marks (716,000 euros) in the D4 48/600 wind turbine from the manufacturer DeWind from Lübeck in Schleswig-Holstein. Five years ago, however, DeWind was taken over by a subsidiary of the South Korean industrial group Daewoo. No one answers the phone at the last liaison office in Hamburg. "Claims for compensation? We can forget about them," says Kellner. Now they want to take their time to find out what happened. This accident is annoying, says Kellner, because a plant usually only starts to generate a lot of money after 13 years: the operators are guaranteed 8.6 cents for each kilowatt hour fed into the grid. For the now crashed generator with 600 kilowatts of power, that would be a good 1200 euros on an optimal wind day in Brandenburg.

Hannelore Brendel, mayor of the municipality of Mühlberg, is using the accident to point out that almost none of the money from these wind turbines stays in the region in which they are located. The situation is different with the landmark of the Koßdorf district, the wooden Dutch windmill, built in 1912. A family business still grinds flour there today.