Safety of Small and Medium Scale Wind Turbines

In order to guarantee safe operation of a wind turbine for the operators and for the public, it is necessary that wind turbines are designed to comply with well defined specifications and incorporate adequate safety systems. These specifications should be based on a safety philosophy which is derived from accepted standards relating to machinery and from actual operational experience. With the aim of establishing a firm basis to be used to arrive at safety recommendations a CEC project has been carried out which can be subdivided into two main parts: the establishment of a method to systematically collect, process and redistribute information on accidents and incidents, and the development of methods to analyse the collected information in order to derive safety recommendations. A questionnaire has been developed for both electricity generating and water pumping wind turbines by means of which an accident or incident can be recorded. As the completed questionnaires (37) available by August 1986, were considered both to be too small a number and a selective choice among known accidents and incidents, it was considered incorrect to treat this data statistically and another analysing method was used. From the recorded events only those events were considered which were typically connected to wind turbine machinery. The analysis of this material led to a number of specific safety recommendations. As the cases which were considered representative of a larger number of actual incidents, then these recommendations are considered to be a first approach to a set of recommendations for general application, which would be completed in the near future. 3 figs., 1 tab., 1 ref.