By Jason Deign in Barcelona

From the surviving accounts it seems high winds may have caused Tim McCartney to lose his footing and plunge to his death.

The Choteau, Montana, resident was apparently trying to remove a 1930s turbine from its tower when he marked a grim milestone for the wind power industry by becoming what appears to be its first fatality, in 1975. He remained the sector’s only mortal victim for the rest of the decade.

But as interest in wind power began to grow in the 1980s, so did the number fatalities. According to a database published by renewable energy industry analyst Paul Gipe, there were eight deaths that decade, followed by 10 in the 1990s. Since 2000 there have been at least 25. 

Apart from a worrying number of fatalities in the United States - twice the international average, according to Gipe - the vast majority are typical of any industry that involves working with heaving machinery at great heights. The question is: could they have been avoided?

Skilled labour

Marc Muhlenbach, for one, thinks the industry is doing what it can to tackle health and safety challenges. “It’s come out as a key issue and an opportunity for turbine manufacturers,” says the Europe wind energy advisory analyst at IHS Emerging Energy Research.

“Clearly it is becoming more and more of a priority because skilled labour is hard enough already to come by.”

What figures exist on the matter would seem to bear this out.

In Spain, for example, the number of accidents that have forced workers to take time off work has fallen from a high of 472 in 2008 to 175 in 2010, according to the Spanish wind energy industry association Asociación Empresarial Eólica (AEE), which publishes a national report.

Over the same period, the country’s annual generating capacity has risen from 31,136 GW to 42,702 GW. Part of the explanation for the drop in accidents may be that workers in Spain’s currently idling wind power sector now work less than they used to.

However, there was also a fall in 2009, when hours went up compared to the previous year.

And a comparison with accident rates in other industries puts Spain’s wind power workers on a par with the service sector, far below other labour-intensive trades such as construction or heavy industry.

Work-related accidents

The severity of injuries has also decreased markedly since 2007, when AEE started publishing its report. As a result, the likelihood of suffering a work-related accident in Spain’s wind energy sector is now “under the level of an office,” says AEE’s Ángel Budia García.

Marcos Suárez Rubio, head of prevention and training at Iberdrola Renewables, echoes this. “Our main sources of accidents are electrical risks and working at heights,” he says. “But the [accident] indexes we are seeing are really low: zero-comma-zero-something in the last year.”

His colleague Elena Caja adds: “We have 2000 and something people in 20 countries and the worst accidents we see are people getting sprains from reaching for a ring binder. There are no mortalities.”

Iberdrola Renewables external communications head Vicente Trullench Arenas says: “In 120 years of operations of course we have had accidents. But the effort that is being made in terms of safety is obsessive.”

Suárez says Iberdrola employees get around 200 hours of training in their first year, with much of it focused on safety.

In the 20 foreign countries in which Iberdrola operates, including the United States, the company makes sure safety standards are in line with national regulations or better.

Risky environment

Most observers agree, however, that maintaining safety standards will become tougher as the industry moves to ever-bigger machines and ever more insecure markets and environments. Offshore wind power started claiming lives in 2009.

To cut the risk, wind power’s obsession with safety may have to be married with an obsession for exchanging information. Iberdrola, for example, is sharing best practice with Scottish Power over offshore development plans.

And Marc Muhlenbach thinks the sector may be able to learn from other industries, such as oil and gas. “The interest of the oil and gas industries in offshore is very noticeable, but it is only a very recent thing,” he says.

“I would imagine that that any exchange between an oil and gas company and an offshore developer would have to include these kinds of issues as well. There is a huge transfer of intelligence that is possible there.”

Provided it happens soon enough to prevent unnecessary fatalities, the deaths of Tim McCartney and those that followed him will not have been in vain.

To respond to this article, please write to:

Jason Deign: mail@jasondeign.com

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Rikki Stancich: rstancich@gmail.com

Image credit: CapAxis