The wind power industry is in the spotlight after news in June that component failures and cracks were occurring in Siemens Energy turbines. The company launched a roughly $1 billion-dollar technical review of its onshore wind farm products, and suffered a 37 percent drop in share value—in what the parent company’s CEO called a “bitter setback.”
NTD spoke to Lisa Linowes, the executive director of WindAction, who says companies are racing to get turbines operational in order to secure subsidies, but at the expense of the kind of engineering and testing needed for reliable performance.