No, wind turbines are not likely to fall on your head, and there is no evidence that wind is more dangerous than other energy sources

In July, an offshore wind turbine near the island of Nantucket, off the northeast coast of the US, spectacularly failed when one of its blades broke into pieces. Blade shards fell into the water, and in the following days, fiberglass debris began washing up on Nantucket’s beaches.

Far beyond the island, the incident galvanized wind power’s critics. Social media users and public figures played up the possibility that more wind turbines would break or that failing turbines would pollute the oceans with toxic chemicals and fiberglass. For example, Daniel Turner wrote in a New York Post opinion article: “If you live in New England, watch your head: falling blades from failing wind farms could be launched your way at any moment — all in the name of ‘climate science.’” Such claims could mislead readers into believing that they are at risk of injury or death from living near wind turbines.

In this review, however, we show that wind energy is safe for the public. Catastrophic blade failures do happen, but they are very infrequent. While wind turbines do suffer fatal accidents, they largely affect workers rather than members of the general public. We further show that, when we account for all types of mortality caused by producing electricity, wind energy is responsible for fewer deaths than fossil fuel sources per unit of energy, since it does not create air pollution.

Wind turbine failures are rare, and blades are not hazardous

Wind energy critics like Turner often claim that spectacular accidents are a recurring pattern — that they show wind energy is both unreliable and dangerous. However, research does show that catastrophic blade failures, incidents that require the wholesale replacement of a wind turbine’s blade, are very rare.

For example, when Carroll et al. studied 350 offshore wind turbines in Europe, they found that an offshore wind turbine’s blades were among the least likely turbine parts to fail. They estimated that a single offshore turbine suffered, on average, 0.001 replacement-level blade failures per year — in other words, 1 in 1000 turbines needed a blade replacement each year. A turbine’s blades were far less likely to need replacing than a turbine’s generator or gearbox, which experienced 0.095 and 0.154 such failures per turbine per year — in other words, around 1 in 10 generators and gearboxes needed replacement each year^[1].

Much of the data is privately held by wind energy companies and inaccessible to third-party researchers. “The wind industry is highly competitive and treats reliability experience as a proprietary asset, so it is difficult to track exact numbers on failures in the field from the public record”, Paul Veers, Senior Research Fellow at the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory, told Science Feedback.

However, the figures we do have still suggest it is exceedingly unlikely that a turbine blade will break in that turbine’s lifetime. Furthermore, Veers told Science Feedback, “Because of the high visibility and extensive media coverage that catastrophic failures get, they must be relatively rare.”

Furthermore, not all blade replacements are caused by a blade physically breaking into pieces, as in Nantucket. For example, a 2021 study of 84 wind turbine blade failures in India and Europe found that the most common reasons for failure were surface erosion and damage from lightning strikes, with manufacturing defects and fires being significantly rarer^[3].

So, the likelihood of a blade physically breaking in pieces and falling into the water (or, presumably, onto people’s heads) is very low. Moreover, Carroll et al. found that onshore wind turbines are significantly less prone to failures than offshore ones, which are larger on average, but built significantly further from most people’s homes and places of daily activity^[1]. Onshore wind turbines are also more common, making up 93% of the world’s wind energy capacity as of 2022.

Indeed, wind turbine blades are specifically designed to avoid breakages like this while withstanding high winds and storms for years on end. Most blades are made from fiberglass-based composite materials that are, despite some claims to the contrary, non-toxic. Fiberglass can irritate the skin and eyes if improperly contacted, but it does not leach chemicals into the ground, and is not a threat to wildlife or human health. Both the US and EU label fiberglass as non-hazardous waste^[4].

In the big picture, fossil fuel power is responsible for many more deaths than any low-carbon energy source

How deadly is a source of electricity? We can compare the number of fatalities attributed to a power source per unit of energy. Most wind-energy-linked deaths are caused by individual accidents: for example, a maintenance worker slipping and falling from a turbine’s height. This differentiates wind energy from other, fossil-fuel-powered sources of electricity. Fossil fuel energy sources are primarily linked to deaths from air pollution that wind turbines do not generate. Therefore, when we look at the bigger picture, we find that wind energy compares quite favorably to fossil-fuel-powered sources.

Sovacool et al. studied accidents between 1990 and 2013 and found wind energy responsible for 0.035 deaths per terawatt-hour (a terawatt-hour is, on average, roughly how much electricity the US consumes in about 2 hours). It is worth noting that most of the wind-energy-linked fatal accidents in the study — 64% of them — affected wind turbine workers, rather than members of the general public. Furthermore, blades and fires only accounted for about half of wind turbine accidents. The rest involved non-mechanical problems, like electrocution or fatal falls^[5].

In comparison, Sovacool et al. blamed hydropower and solar power each with 0.02 accidental fatalities per terawatt-hour (with most deaths coming from dam failures for hydro or accidents during installation for solar) and nuclear power for 0.01 (with most nuclear-power-linked deaths linked to the high-profile Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters)^[5]. Their study only estimated deaths linked to non-fossil-fuel-powered electrical sources. However, a 2007 estimate in The Lancet blamed lignite and coal for 0.12 accidental fatalities per terawatt-hour, oil for 0.03, natural gas for 0.02, and nuclear power for about 0.02 (with accidents occurring both while extracting fossil fuels and at the power plant)^[6].

On the other hand, a 2021 study, which Sovacool co-authored, examined a larger dataset of accidents and found a substantially higher wind-related fatality rate: on average, 0.45 fatalities per terawatt-hour^[7]. This gives wind power a higher accident rate than other power sources.

However, when we account for deaths from air pollution, even this higher estimate blames wind wind energy for fewer deaths than fossil fuel sources. In addition to pumping greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, burning fossil fuels emits ground-level ozone, fine particulate matter, and other air pollutants that have potentially deadly consequences for people’s respiratory health. One estimate in the British Medical Journal blamed fossil fuel use for approximately 5.13 million excess deaths in one year, 2019^[8]. 

Power plants are responsible for a share of those deaths, and if we want to compare different energy sources, we must include those deaths. Markandya and Wilkinson estimated in The Lancet that gas electricity generation was responsible for 2.8 air-pollution-related deaths per terawatt-hour, biomass for 4.6, oil for 18.4, coal for 24.5, and lignite for 32.6^[6]. Even gas power’s relatively low number dwarfs the accident-related deaths from any power source, whether it involves fossil fuels or not. Coal’s high air-pollution-related death count is especially noteworthy given that, in 2023, coal produced more than four times as much electricity as wind turbines.

The Lancet study’s authors did not explicitly quantify deaths from solar power, wind power, or hydropower, stating that “some emissions of air pollutants can arise during manufacture and construction, such as in the production of steel for wind turbines and concrete for dams, but these are low compared with any but the cleanest system relying on combustion for electricity generation”^[6].

The average wind turbine accident, while still tragic and unfortunate, also tends to be very small in scale^[5,7]. Benjamin Sovacool, Professor of Energy Policy at the University of Sussex and an author of two of the aforementioned studies, told Science Feedback:

The accidents from wind are much, much less serious than nuclear meltdowns such as Fukushima, the Merrimack Valley gas pipeline explosions, or major oil disasters like Deepwater Horizon. Wind turbine accidents are lower in intensity and similar to a car crash in terms of their overall impact – in isolation, not as serious or devastating as those impacts coming from fossil fuels or the nuclear power supply chain.

Conclusion

In conclusion, portraying wind turbines as deadly is misleading. A wind turbine blade breaking in pieces is a very rare event. Although wind energy is prone to accidents, so is any energy source, and members of the general public who live near turbines are not at high risk.

Portraying wind turbines as dangerous to human life also lacks context. When we account for more global factors, wind energy is likely significantly less dangerous than fossil-fuel-powered energy sources. This is because wind turbines are responsible for far less air pollution from burning fossil fuels. Deaths attributed to power plants’ air pollution vastly outnumber deaths attributed to power-plant-related accidents.

References:

1. Carroll et al. (2016) Failure rate, repair time and unscheduled O&M cost analysis of offshore wind turbines. Wind Energy.
2. Madvar et al. (2019) Forecasting of wind energy technology domains based on the technology life cycle approach. Energy Reports.
3. Boopathy et al. (2021) Failure mechanisms of wind turbine blades in India: Climatic, regional, and seasonal variability. Wind Energy.
4. Beauson et al. (2022) The complex end-of-life of wind turbine blades: A review of the European context. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews.
5. Sovacool et al. (2016) Balancing safety with sustainability: assessing the risk of accidents for modern low-carbon energy systems. Journal of Cleaner Production.
6. Markandya and Wilkinson. (2007) Electricity generation and health. The Lancet.
7. Kim et al. (2021) Critically assessing and projecting the frequency, severity, and cost of major energy accidents. The Extractive Industries and Society.
8. Lelieveld et al. (2023) Air pollution deaths attributable to fossil fuels: observational and modelling study. The British Medical Journal.