Are injuries from wind turbines common?

Wind turbine collapses or blade failures are extremely uncommon, and wind power causes far fewer deaths per unit of electricity than fossil fuels.

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Modern utility-scale turbines use monitoring and shutdown systems designed to handle extreme weather, including hurricanes. Concerns about blades breaking off were more common in earlier years of wind development, but improved engineering and hazard sensors have made these events exceedingly infrequent. One study estimated the turbine blade failure rate at about 0.54% per year, with the U.S. Department of Energy describing “catastrophic” failures as rare events.

Safety comparisons utilize “deaths per terawatt-hour,” which counts both direct accidents (like mining, drilling, transport and plant accidents) and indirect deaths from air pollution or emissions. By this measure, wind is estimated to cause about 0.04 deaths/TWh, far below coal (24-33 deaths), oil (18), or natural gas (3).

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