I’ll have to dig a bit more to figure out what actually happened here, but the gist is that wind turbines are supposed to engage brakes when it gets to windy so they don’t spin out of control and explode. This one has a brake failure and spins out of control and explodes as a result.

If you watch the actual explosion carefully, you’ll see that it happens in three phases:

1. One blade breaks and throws the whole thing off-balance.
2. The second blade crashes into the support tower, breaking both the tower and the blade.
3. Some combination of outward forces and collisions with debris/the tower breaks the final blade.

…after that, the whole thing comes crashing down. This video shows the thing actually hitting the ground, which is pretty amazing.

The YouTube commentary is, as always, amazingly stupid. There’s some combination of people not understanding what’s going on, not realizing that something happens after the first couple seconds, and some “problem solvers” suggesting that steps be taken to prevent windmills from breaking in high winds in the future.

In any event, this is a pretty rare occurrence and it’s pretty spectacular to watch.