Ameren Missouri, the St. Louis utility that owns the farm, sent KTVO a statement on Saturday evening from Jeff Moore, its director of Renewables & CTG Operations: “Today, Ameren Missouri responded to an incident with one of the turbines at the High Prairie Renewable Energy Center and secured the surrounding area. There were no injuries, and we are conducting a comprehensive assessment to determine the cause. While the situation is being assessed, High Prairie Renewable Energy Center may be periodically offline.”<\/p>\n
If that reads familiar, it’s because it’s nearly word for word the statement Moore gave the same station after the August 26 collapse, with “Today” swapped in for “On Wednesday afternoon.” I don’t say that to be snide. After five of these, a form letter is just a pretty odd way to talk to the people who live under the other 170 towers.<\/p>\n
Saturday’s was the first collapse on the Adair County side of the farm. The other four, in late April, August and October of 2024 and then this past August 26, all came down in Schuyler County, up by the Iowa line, and we went through those four last week<\/a>.<\/p>\n So how big is the thing that went over? High Prairie runs 175 Vestas turbines, 163 of them the V120-2.2 model and 12 of them the bigger V112 rated at 3.45 megawatts, according to the monitoring report Ameren’s consultant filed with the state. Ameren hasn’t said which model fell on Saturday, so the numbers I’m about to give you are the V120’s, which is the right bet 163 times out of 175.<\/p>\n The hub sits 92 meters up, about 302 feet, going by the foundation design documents listed in Ameren’s own filings with the Missouri Public Service Commission, and with one blade pointed straight up the tip reaches roughly 499 feet. That’s the thing that folded over into a pasture on Saturday.<\/p>\n We’re not naming her, and we’re leaving out where exactly she lived, to protect her privacy. She’s a former resident who has since moved away, and she says she has been photographing the wind farm since the towers were going up.<\/p>\n The photos in this article are hers. She took them Saturday afternoon from a road and a fence line, and what you’re looking at is a tower snapped in half, the upper section folded down into an upside-down V beside the standing stump, with the nacelle and blades crumpled on the ground.<\/p>\n Three intact turbines are spinning on the right of the frame. I’d say those three are the most interesting thing in the picture, and I’ll come back to them.<\/p>\n She wrote to me after last week’s story and said “you are the first reporter to say something isn’t right here.” I’ll take that and leave it there, because she’s a former neighbor with a grievance, not an investigator, and what she says is more useful than the compliment. So everything she told us is labeled as hers, and next to each claim I’ll put what the public record shows.<\/p>\n She says the turbines are shut down at night six months a year because of endangered bat deaths. The record mostly backs her. High Prairie operates under a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service incidental take permit<\/a> covering the Indiana bat, the northern long-eared bat and the little brown bat, in force from May 14, 2021 to May 14, 2027.<\/p>\n Commission staff describe the farm as curtailed overnight during bat season from April through October, seven months by their calendar, and Ameren stopped all nighttime operations voluntarily on June 21, 2021. If you’ve never run into the word, curtailment just means the operator parks the blades on purpose when it could be making power. Here that’s every night for most of the year.<\/p>\n She says her electric rates have gone up three times. I can’t confirm that count and I’m not going to pretend to.<\/p>\n What I can tell you is that Ameren has been through at least three rate cases in which High Prairie’s costs were fought over, and in the latest one the Office of the Public Counsel<\/a> asked the commission to strip 25 to 45 percent of High Prairie’s costs out of what customers pay, on the grounds that the farm sat idle 25 percent of 2023 and 45 percent of 2024. In that same case, commission staff put the off-system sales lost to the overnight shutdown at $10,963,381 and the lost federal production tax credits at $12,573,769 through the end of 2024. Those are losses rather than rate hikes, but they land on the same customers.<\/p>\n She says there were about two years of blade replacements, “well over 100 blades,” and that workers on the site told her the problem is a “holster component” where the blades attach. That’s secondhand and I can’t verify it.<\/p>\nWhat fell, and what nobody has said about it<\/h2>\n
The woman on the other side of the fence<\/h2>\n
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What she says, and what the record says<\/h2>\n
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