The road runs straight through spruce forest in central Sweden, past turbine after identical turbine.
At one of them, something is missing.
A clean white blade should sweep that side of the hub.
Instead there is a jagged stump, and pale fragments scattered in the snow below.
This is not the first time a blade from this exact turbine model has come down here.
It is the third machine at this wind farm to lose one.
What keeps breaking, and why nobody can say for sure
Each failure at this site has been investigated separately, and the answers have not matched. The first was traced to a lamination defect in one specific blade, a problem with how layers of composite and resin had bonded during manufacturing. The operator described it at the time as an isolated event.
The second produced a different answer. That investigation concluded the blade had most likely been damaged during installation, while adding that a manufacturing fault could not be ruled out, only that it looked less likely.
The third is still open. The asset manager has said publicly that it is waiting for the analysis before drawing any conclusion about a link between the three.
What the first two share is that neither flaw was visible from the ground. A finished composite blade with a hidden bonding flaw looks and weighs much the same as a sound one, and the weakness only shows once the rotor starts carrying real loads, bending through thousands of rotations a day. A technician on a visual check cannot see a weak bond line buried inside a blade’s internal web, and finding one takes a targeted scan rather than a walk past.
A wind farm built around 33 turbines and blades that have not stayed whole
The site sits about 310 miles north of Stockholm, in Ragunda municipality in Jämtland county, a short drive from the village of Borgvattnet. It is a 175 megawatt project of 33 identical turbines rated at 5.3 megawatts apiece, strung across forested hills, and it sells most of its electricity to a single corporate buyer under a long term contract.
The rotor blades run about 259 feet each. Each machine carries a two piece blade design, an approach meant to make transporting and installing very long rotors easier on narrow forest roads. That model has now become the common thread connecting three separate blade failures at one location, something wind engineers rarely see repeated at a single site.
When the most recent blade let go, technicians driving in early in the morning spotted it from the nearby departmental road before they reached the tower. The broken section had landed at the foot of the turbine, with a part still attached above, and inspectors found nothing left hanging.
How three breaks at three towers produced three different answers
The first blade came apart in September 2021. The second followed in July 2022, at turbine 13, at about eight in the evening; a family with children picking berries nearby saw debris fall, and the operator said afterwards that it had been in touch with them to check on their welfare.
“We don’t want to speculate on the root cause at present,” the operations director said that week, before the investigation settled on installation damage as the probable cause. Each event has triggered a similar response, with crews establishing a safety perimeter and several neighboring turbines shut down for inspection.
After the second break, five other turbines were stopped inside a roughly 820-foot cordon while every machine in the park was checked. The third blade snapped on Friday 13 March 2026, and nobody has been hurt in any of the three incidents.
The park kept running, with the area around the damaged tower closed off. The operator noted that repair would be slow, since a crane and a replacement blade both have to reach the site, and spring thaw is a poor season for heavy transport on forest roads.
What the pattern might mean for turbines everywhere
Hidden damage is a recurring theme in energy infrastructure. Crews tracking fish through a dam’s spiral turbine in Connecticut and divers inspecting the legs of offshore machines have both shown how much hidden wear a structure can carry without visible signs on the outside, and blades are no different.
The same turbine model has shed blades elsewhere. At a wind farm in Lower Saxony, Germany, three blades of the same type have broken, two of them from a single machine within weeks of each other, with the operator there saying the root causes were still unknown.
Other projects run into their own unglamorous shortfalls. A pilot at a geothermal site in California, for instance, fell short of its own target despite promising early numbers.
Three towers, and still no single explanation
What makes this wind farm unusual is not one unlucky turbine but the spread. Three different towers, two closed investigations that reached different conclusions, and a third review still running.
For now the remaining turbines keep turning, and inspections continue. The forest road still carries the same test each time a technician drives past and counts the blades.
Read the whole thing?
Get the week's signal, not the noise
Our sharpest reporting on energy, climate and nature — free, once a week.
