oh come on, that’s just because no one was around to film cernobyl and get it up on youtube :P

I sent this to my wind geek and he replied with the following:

“Nice (and scary) video. Without looking more into the actual scenario and tracking down where the wind turbine was located, here is my take on what most likely happened.

This looks like a relatively old and small turbine – the braking mechanisms on these machines often did not have redundancy so if there is a major issue with the braking system and very strong winds there is a chance that the turbine can overspeed and cause forces on the structure well beyond the design limits. This is what was happening here as it was definately rotating much faster than it was supposed to. A good everyday equivalent would be an early model car like my 1966 MGB where any leak in the braking system would render my braking ability from highway speeds non existant.

For the turbine the actual trigger for the catastrophic failure was the result of a tower-blade collision due to excessive force on the blades bending them back toward the tower.

There are several reasons why failure like this is very unlikely if not impossible in a modern wind turbine but the main reason is that each blade on modern turbines is able to act (pitch) independently as an aerodynamic brake and stop the turbine regardless of the position of the other two blades. Each blade has it’s own back up power supply and overspeed trigger system, so unless everything randomly fails together there is almost no chance of a video worthy performance.”