Vestas V236 Blade Fails, Japan Wires Wind to a Data Center

Allen covers the V236 blade failure at He Dreiht, Maine&#8217;s first full-size floating turbine, and Japan&#8217;s wind-powered data center. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard&#8217;s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary&#8217;s &#8220;Engineering with Rosie&#8221; YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Happy Monday Everyone The V236 just had a bad week&#160;last week. a blade failed on one of the turbines at ENBW&#8217;s [EN-bay-vay&#8217;s] HE DREIHT [hay DRYT] offshore wind farm in the German North Sea. Nine hundred and sixty megawatts. There are 64&#160;of those V236 machines. The project hit first power just last November. ENBW says no one was hurt. VESTAS says it has launched a root cause investigation. But a blade failure on your flagship turbine &#8230; at one of Germany&#8217;s biggest offshore wind farms? That&#160;will be a&#160;headline. And the industry is watching. Now &#8230; from the North Sea &#8230; to the coast of Maine. The UNIVERSITY OF MAINE has done something no one in America has done before. They put a full-size floating wind turbine in the ocean. And it is delivering power to the grid. The platform is called VOLTURNUS [vol-TURN-us]. It was assembled onshore &#8230; in Brewer, Maine &#8230; then towed thirty miles down the PENOBSCOT [peh-NOB-skot] River and out to sea. No specialized heavy-lift vessels. No deepwater pile driving. The hull is made of concrete &#8230; sourced locally. Not imported steel. Eighty percent of the best offshore wind in America sits over water too deep for fixed-bottom foundations. Floating platforms like VOLTURNUS could change that math entirely. Meanwhile &#8230; in Japan &#8230; wind energy just found a brand-new customer. Data centers. EURUS [YOO-rus] ENERGY and TOYOTA TSUSHO [TOY-oh-tah&#160;TSOO-shoh] have broken ground on a wind-powered data center in HOKKAIDO [hoh-KY-doh]. It is the first data center in Japan directly connected to a wind farm. The facility sits next to the KOBAOKO [koh-bah-OH-koh] Wind Farm &#8230; forty-two megawatts &#8230; with a private power line running straight to the servers. And here is the bigger picture. Japan has most of its data centers packed into Tokyo and Osaka. HOKKAIDO has the wind &#8230; but not the demand. So instead of sending the power somewhere else &#8230; they are bringing the demand to the wind. TOYOTA TSUSHO already operates ten wind farms in the region &#8230; <p class="wp-bloc