If you’ve ever driven past a wind farm, you know the drill. A few dozen white towers on a ridge or a bean field, blades turning or not, and nothing much going on. That’s the whole appeal of the things from a utility’s point of view. You put them up, you plug them in, and they sit there for 20 or 25 years turning weather into money.
The biggest wind farm in Missouri has now broken that deal four times in a little over two years. The latest one came down on a Wednesday afternoon in late August, and from the looks of things it went over the way the three before it did: all at once, into a field, with nobody near it.
So what happened this time?
On August 26, just after 1:30 p.m., one of the 175 turbines at the High Prairie Renewable Energy Center folded over in a field along Schuyler County Route D, about four miles southeast of Lancaster, up near the Iowa line. A viewer sent KTVO, the local TV station in Kirksville, two photos of the wreck, and the station went to the owner for comment.
The owner is Ameren Missouri, the St. Louis utility, and Jeff Moore, its director of Renewables and CTG Operations, sent back a statement saying the company had secured the area and that “there were no injuries, and we are conducting a comprehensive assessment to determine the cause.” Moore’s statement also warned that the farm might go offline now and then while that assessment runs.
Nobody was hurt. That’s the good news, and I’d argue it’s also a bit of luck, because the thing that fell isn’t small.
How big a machine are we talking about?
High Prairie runs on 175 Vestas turbines, and 163 of them are the Danish company’s V120-2.2 model. The 120 in the name is the rotor diameter in meters, which works out to 394 feet of spinning blade, tip to tip, sweeping a circle of roughly 121,700 square feet. The other 12 machines are a bigger 3.45-megawatt model with a slightly smaller rotor. Ameren hasn’t said which type went down on August 26, so the 394-foot figure is a 163-out-of-175 bet on my part. I also couldn’t find a published weight for the V120 or a hub height for this particular farm, and Vestas doesn’t list either on its public spec sheet, so I can’t tell you how many tons hit the dirt. A lot, is the short answer.
Add it all up and High Prairie is rated at 400 megawatts, which Ameren says is enough for about 120,000 homes. The farm started running in 2020, and Ameren bought it that December from the developer that built it. So we’re talking about a machine that’s been in service for roughly five years, which in turbine terms is barely out of warranty.
The three before it didn’t all fall the same way
Here’s where it gets interesting, and where a lot of the coverage has been a little sloppy. The usual line is that all three of the 2024 collapses came down to blades, and that’s not quite what Ameren told the state.
In a filing to the Missouri Public Service Commission dated November 7, 2024, David Meiners, who was then Ameren’s director of renewable operations, wrote that the first collapse, in late April, “involved the tower structure itself,” while the August 25 and October 31 collapses were preceded by what looked like a blade failure. You can read the one-page response yourself on the commission’s website. So two of the three were blades. One, apparently, was the tower.
Why does a blade matter so much? A turbine rotor is basically a three-bladed propeller balanced around a hub, and each blade on a 394-foot rotor is a bit under 200 feet long. Lose one, or a big chunk of one, and the other two are suddenly swinging their weight off-center at the top of a steel tube. Meiners put it plainly to the Adair County commission in March 2025: the blades came off and the imbalance brought the turbines down. A neighbor who lived a quarter mile from the October tower told KTVO the blades went first, two of them breaking apart, and the base buckled right after. Which is pretty much the textbook version of that failure.
Vestas, for its part, said after the third collapse that it’d started a root cause analysis and had paused the rest of the site as an extraordinary precaution. By March 2025, Ameren had only about 15 of the 175 turbines running again, the ones it was confident didn’t have the blade issue, and the plan at the time was to swap blades based on what inspections turned up. I couldn’t find a public statement on when, or whether, the farm got back to full strength after that, which is a frankly odd gap for a 400-megawatt plant that ratepayers are helping pay for.
So was the fourth one a blade too?
Ameren hasn’t said, and KTVO said as much in its update: as of the day it happened, the cause of the August 26 collapse wasn’t known. The photos show the tower folded over in the field, which fits either story, and I’m not going to guess from two viewer snapshots.
Missouri has had a rough summer for towers
High Prairie isn’t the only Missouri wind farm that lost a tower this year. On July 31, 26 days before the Lancaster collapse, a turbine at the North Fork Ridge Wind Farm in Barton County, down in the southwest corner of the state, went over on a Friday afternoon. That farm belongs to Liberty Utilities, which told KOAM that nobody was at the site when it happened and nobody was hurt. Different owner, different farm, more than 200 miles apart, and as far as I can tell no one has linked the two. Still, two towers on the ground in one state in under a month is a stat you’d rather not have.
Keep in mind what a tower is supposed to do when it comes down. We covered a Wyoming farm where crews felled 240-foot towers with shaped charges this summer, and that’s the version with a permit, a fire chief and a video. The Missouri version has a viewer with a phone. We’ve also seen what one bad blade can do to a whole fleet: 64 turbines sat idle in the North Sea after a single blade dropped. High Prairie’s 2025 looked a lot like that, just on dry land.
So is this a Vestas problem or a High Prairie problem?
I don’t know, and I’d be skeptical of anyone who says they do at this point. The V120-2.2 is a mainstream machine that Vestas sells all over the world, and I can’t find a pattern of towers going over anywhere else that looks like this one. That’d point toward something specific to this site, this batch of blades, or how the farm was run, rather than the design itself. But that’s my reading of the public record, not a finding, and the people with the actual data are Ameren and Vestas.
What we do know is that the farm has already been a sore point in Missouri rate cases. Testimony filed in Ameren’s 2024 rate case went after High Prairie’s underperformance, and the collapses were part of that argument, along with a separate issue where the turbines are curtailed at night to protect bats. A plant that sits mostly idle for months doesn’t make the electricity its customers paid to build it for, and that money’s argued over in Jefferson City.
So what you’ve got, for the moment, is Moore’s August 26 statement to KTVO promising a comprehensive assessment of the fourth collapse, and the Schuyler County Times running those same lines on September 5. If Ameren says what it found, we’ll tell you.
