This summer’s sequel to the 1996 movie “Twister” brings back the familiar thrills of Midwest tornado-chasing with a new connection to the energy sector: collapsing wind turbines.
In “Twisters,” a caravan of trucks led by Kate Carter, a fictitious physicist who works at the National Weather Service, and Tyler Owens, a storm-chaser, follow a tornado that spirals through an Oklahoma wind farm. At one point, the twister collides with a massive turbine, toppling it to the ground and snapping off a blade that lands dangerously close to the vehicles.
The scene, while fictitious, raises questions about Hollywood’s depiction of renewable energy and safety, especially as large-scale wind projects are facing rising local pushback. The film also arrives amid concerns — some valid and some not — about how extreme weather driven by climate change could affect large energy infrastructure. Wind currently powers roughly 10 percent of U.S. electricity and could grow more than 200 percent by midcentury, according to the Energy Information Administration.
Christopher Nowotarski, an associate professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University, said “there’s a heavy dose of Hollywood magic sprinkled on,” when asked about separating fact from fiction in “Twisters,” which has earned over $200 million this summer in the U.S. and Canada. He said most tornadoes are not powerful enough to uproot large infrastructure such as turbines.
“[The characters] drove a truck into that same tornado for fun, remember? So, if the winds were strong enough to do that to a turbine, they certainly would not have survived in that truck,” he said.
Companies and regulators have spent years developing policies and infrastructure to minimize damage posed by extreme storms to both wind turbines and towers. Many of the leading wind-generating states — Oklahoma, Texas, and Iowa — are tornado hot spots, but there have been few reported cases of twisters dislodging turbines or blades this year, according to Joshua Fergen, a rural sociologist and research associate at the University of Minnesota Medical School-Duluth.
According to the Department of Energy, turbines are designed to shut off when winds exceed certain thresholds, typically around 55 mph. The turbines can also lock and tilt their blades, thereby minimizing the strain by high-speed winds created by a tornado. The towers themselves are built to withstand high wind speeds created by extreme storms.
On its website, DOE says that wind farms are typically built a “safe distance” away from populated areas after an extensive siting process.
Nowotarski said that wind farms have an advantage over other power plants when it comes to being resilient to tornado damage. Wind power is generated in a distributed fashion across many — sometimes hundreds — of towers.
“Maybe a tornado knocks down a handful of wind towers but the wind farm can still operate the next day,” said Nowotarski. “But if [it] takes out a power plant, then you are going to lose a lot more power generation.”
Nowotarski pointed to evidence that tornadoes and extreme storms pose a much bigger risk to power grids reliant on fossil fuels than ones with a high integration of renewables, like wind.
For example, a 2022 study in the journal Energy found that wind power provides a net benefit as backup energy after storms, although offshore wind turbines in New England are typically shut off during extreme weather to protect them from damage. In other words, when storms cause damage to parts of the grid that can’t be easily protected, such as high tension wires, the turbines can typically generate power. The researchers found the wind integration also keeps electricity prices low during storm events.
Climate and falling towers
Yet DOE notes that a direct hit from a tornado can cause damage to wind farms.
Between 2007 and 2017, there were 1,479 wind turbine accidents worldwide, according to a 2019 study published in the Journal of Wind Engineering and Industrial Aerodynamics. Thirty-three cases involved a “collapse” from a storm event.
The growth in the wind industry also is occurring as global temperatures continue to rise, raising the prospect that there could be more opportunities for worsening severe weather to intersect with turbines. The link between climate change and tornadoes is not as well established as some other phenomena, such as sea level rise, however.
On its website, NOAA states that there could be “a greater risk of more off-season tornadoes in a warmer future climate,” but “unlike temperature or precipitation trends, the influence of climate change on tornadoes is far more difficult to discern” because of the complex atmospheric factors involved.
There are recent examples of tornadoes hitting wind farms, including near Greenfield, Iowa, where one crumpled 10 towers three months ago.
In that incident, a tornado hit MidAmerican Energy’s Orient wind farm with recorded wind speeds of more than 100 mph, causing five wind towers to fall to the ground. Turbines also collapsed at other farms. There were no reports that the damage affected the local power supply.
Social media posts about Iowa’s turbine-toppling tornado “overstated” the risk posed by extreme weather to wind farms, according to AFB Fact Check, a fact-checking service of the French news agency Agence France-Presse.
“I see social media weaponizing perceptions of wind energy,” said Fergen, who has studied the effects of social media posts on wind opposition. He said he saw a recording of the recent Iowa wind farm disaster “go viral” across anti-wind websites this year.
Extreme visuals — whether depicting a rare event shared on social media or a fictitious scene in a Hollywood film — give people a sense of an “invisible risk” that is based on perception instead of objective facts, Fergen added.
“What I do know is that these collapsing accidents are still very rare,” said Fergen. “When they do happen, they produce very powerful visuals. They give the perception that malfunctions are a growing issue. And they’re not.”
Correction: A previous version of this story misstated the number of turbines that collapsed at MidAmerican’s wind farm in Iowa.
