Do Wind turbines throw chunks of ice in winter ?
Under exactly the right conditions, ice CAN form on turbine blades. However, like the airplane wing that needs to be deiced to perform properly, turbine blades become inefficient when their aerodynamic shape is changed by a coating of ice and they slow down and eventually stop. It is much more likely that ice will simply fall off a turbine – just as it will fall off any large structure. In case ice should fall off when melting, the globally accepted safe zone is about 1.5 times the distance from the ground to the tip up the upper blade. A study taken of hundreds of sites in Europe last year found very few fragments of ice of any size even inside that zone and only two small fragments beyond that.
