A shorn turbine blade proves to be more bad news for Suzlon Energy:
Shares of India’s Suzlon Energy Ltd., the world’s fifth-largest maker of wind turbines, crashed 39% on Friday after a report that a 140-foot-long blade had shorn off a turbine tower at a project financed by Deere & Co. in the U.S. Midwest.
The accident is the latest and most serious in a series of blade splitting and other technical problems in the U.S. and India which have hurt Suzlon’s image. The share-price decline Friday also reflected investor concerns that Suzlon will be unable to raise the money it needs in coming months to fund an ambitious global expansion plan, and may be forced to sell assets, analysts said.
A report Thursday in the Peoria Journal Star, an Illinois.-based newspaper, quoted Richard Shertz, a farmer from near Wyanet, Ill., as saying he heard a noise like thunder Wednesday morning and later found the huge blade lying in one of his cornfields, 150 feet away from the turbine’s tower. A photo accompanying the article shows the Suzlon turbine tower with a stump near the central hub where one of the blades should have been attached.
Earlier this year, Suzlon said it was recalling 1,251 blades, or almost the entire number it has sold to date in the U.S. after cracks were found on over 60 blades on turbines run by Deere and Edison International’s Edison Mission Energy.