Mingyang Smart Energy has installed what the company claims to be the world’s largest single-capacity offshore wind turbine, the MySE 18.X-20 MW, in Hainan, China.
The unit features flexible power ratings ranging from 18.X to 20 MW, coupled with rotor diameters from 260-292 metres, covering a maximum swept area equivalent to nine soccer fields.
According to Mingyang’s website, the wind turbine can withstand winds up to 79.8 m/s.
(A category 5 hurricane)
This is an enormous engineering achievement, they already make 16 MW offshore turbines:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_L6Yz3t9e8Wow, what’s the size limit going to actually be? 20MW is phenomenal from a single turbine, but what could we hit?
It’s an interesting question actually, there would be a material limit to how long components like the blades can be.
It’s also possible they’re just not cost effective above a certain size, too.
The pessimist in me worries it will break in a storm then get paraded around as an example of why wind can’t replace fossil fuels…
It might but wind based energy production won’t go away. It has already proven its place in energy production. While there’s a lot of people that had invested in fossil and nuclear, there’s a lot of investors in wind energy too.
Wind energy production will just get more efficient and getting closer to being CO2 neutral in the future.
