Wind Turbine as Tall as a 70-Story Building Announced in China

Extreme engineering is becoming the norm as offshore wind continues to scale up. Sweeping the area of 12.3 standard NFL fields each rotation, with gargantuan 140-meter (459-ft) blades, the MySE 18.X-28X will be the largest wind turbine ever built. From a report: Only a week ago, we wrote about CSSC's new H260-18MW, the world's largest wind turbine. Partially constructed at a special and very spacious seaside facility, this offshore wind giant took over from MingYang's MySE 16.0-242 as the biggest wind turbine on the planet. Now, MingYang has struck back in this game of one-upsmanship with the announcement of something significantly bigger. And it's not like CSSC's 18-megawatt rated effort was small; each of its three blades stretches a near-unthinkable 128 m (420 ft). But the new MySE 18.X-28X promises to push "beyond the 18 MW threshold," with a mind-boggling swept area of 66,052 sq m (711,000 sq ft). MingYang says it'll handle "the most extreme ocean conditions," including level-17 typhoons with wind speeds over 56.1 m/s (202 km/h / 125.5 mph). Given an average wind speed of 8.5 m/s (30.6 km/h / 19 mph), MingYang projects it will produce 80 GWh of energy per year, "sufficient to supply 96,000 residents." Why go to the trouble of making these things so enormous? Well, increasing the swept area of your fan increases the slice of sky you're harvesting energy from, and it bumps up your overall yield. But perhaps more importantly, wind farms need to be thought of as total systems. One of the biggest costs in an offshore installation is the work needed at the sea bed to root these huge turbines down and give the wind something to push against.

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