PAXTON — Officials for RWE Renewables Americas LLC are investigating what caused one of the 400-foot-tall wind turbines in its Pioneer Trail Wind Farm near Paxton to begin leaning at an angle Wednesday.
The turbine, located just south of Illinois 9 and east of County Road 2300 East between Paxton and Clarence in eastern Ford County, was discovered to be leaning when RWE site workers arrived around 6:45 a.m. Wednesday at the 94-turbine, 150-megawatt wind farm, according to Matt Tulis, communications manager for the Austin, Texas-based firm.
The National Weather Service received reports of wind gusts exceeding 30 mph throughout the area overnight.
The turbine has been taken offline, and no injuries or damage to surrounding properties have been reported, Tulis said.
“We’ve notified the local authorities, and we’ve put up barricades to limit direct access to the turbine while we investigate what happened,” Tulis said. “At this point, there is no danger to any private structures, public roads, transmission lines or any other infrastructure out there.”
Meanwhile, the investigation continues into what happened, Tulis said.
“We’ve got our engineering teams and the site guys looking into what happened, but it’s still early in the process to try to figure out what’s going on out there,” Tulis said. “ … Something happened overnight while nobody was actually there. All that’s part of the investigation, where they’re looking at if they can see when it went offline and work backwards and try to figure out what happened.”
Whether the turbine can be repaired or will need to be removed and replaced had not yet been determined, Tulis said.
“Too early to tell on any of that,” Tulis said. “We still need to do some more analysis.”
Tulis said this is the first time this issue has happened in an RWE-owned wind farm. The company operates about 35 wind farms nationwide, with an estimated 3,000 turbines in all, Tulis said.
“This is a rare incident for us,” Tulis said. “We haven’t seen this on any of our other projects, either in the Midwest or around the country, so it’s pretty unusual.”
As of Thursday, the turbine was still offline and not producing energy, Tulis said, adding that it “will be for some time.”
“We are still in the process of looking at the root cause to determine what happened to the turbine,” Tulis said.
The Pioneer Trail Wind Farm was the first built in Ford County, which today has three. It was owned and operated by E.On Climate & Renewables North America until 2019, when the firm merged with RWE.
When the wind farm began operation in October 2011, E.On Climate & Renewables North America estimated that it would generate $29 million in property tax revenue for local taxing bodies over its 25-year life span, including $1.2 million annually for the Paxton-Buckley-Loda school district, and distribute more than $50 million in lease and royalty payments to landowners.