undesired effects such as for example oscillations will be brought about the wind power plant 10 can therefore no longer be operated under the control of the main controller 20 the main controller 20 contains a monitoring module 28 which continuously monitors whether such a fault occurs the wind power plant 10 additionally comprises a minimal controller 27 in case of a fault the complete set of state variables which is processed in the main controller 20 is not fed to the minimal controller 27 but instead only one subset of state variables in the exemplary embodiment in fig2 the subset of state variables comprises the information from the pitch sensor 21 in the rotor blade 16 and the information from the torque sensor 23 in the power converter 19 for example the information about the temperature of the gear oil or about the parameters of the generated electrical energy does not belong to the subset of state variables the minimal controller 27 is configured to determine on the basis of the subset of state variables preset actuation values which permit orderly powering down of the wind power plant 10 the subset of state variables is sufficient for this purpose if the wind power plant 10 is operated under the control of the minimal controller 27 it is therefore not a case of continuing the generation of electrical energy but instead of powering down the wind power plant 10 in a controlled process and of keeping the stresses caused by the braking of the rotor 13 small in particular the stresses are small compared to the stresses which occur.