GE’s Mega Offshore Wind Turbine, When Bigger May Be Better

Posted on by January 10, 2021

Sometimes size matters. We have recently seen ever-larger container ships delivered from Asian shipyards. This year, the HMM Algeciras claimed the title of the world’s largest container ship with a carrying capacity of 24,000 TEUs. It is one of twelve eco-friendly container vessels delivered or under construction at Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering in Ulsan, Korea.

Bigger is not always better, of course. The Ultra Large Crude Carrier (ULCC) tanker Seawise Giant, later Knock Nevis, at 565,000 DWT was by many standards just too large. It was too large, for example, to transit the English Channel at a full load. After a long and generally successful career, it was scrapped in 2009 and no tanker has been built as large since.

These thoughts on size were triggered by a new and larger offshore wind turbine design developed by GE. The Haliade-X offshore turbine features a 14 MW, 13 MW, or 12 MW capacity, 220-meter rotor, a 107-meter blade. By comparison, in recent years the average offshore wind turbine capacity has been around 3.6 MW. Relatively newer turbine designs installed off Block Island and off Virginia have used 6 MW turbines, less than half the capacity of the Haliade-X.

Each blade of the Haliade-X turbine is longer than an American football field. Under optimum conditions,  a 13 MW turbine could produce 312 megawatt-hours (MWh) in a day.  

John Rogers writing in the Union of Concerned Scientists blog, comments:

Hearing that 312 MWh number got me thinking about how much electricity the average home uses in these parts, and wondering how it compared. So I did the math: At full power, a turbine that size could cover a whole household’s daily electricity needs in under 7 seconds.

Sure, not every day is that windy, you’d lose some energy transmitting it from the turbine to the home, and you’d need storage to use it the other 86,393 seconds of the day. (So I wouldn’t recommend this approach for DIY home power…)

But still: 7 seconds.

Rogers also identifies the advantages of the new larger turbines:

  • Fewer turbines – That math is pretty simple: An 800 MW project would need 84 of the 9.5 MW turbines (or 133 6 MW turbines). If the project ends up with a 13 MW model, the turbine count can drop to 62.
  • Fewer installations – Fewer turbines mean commensurately fewer turbine sites, fewer foundations, and less of everything that comes along with having to prepare and install them.
  • Less area – And, if the turbines keep the same spacing—which would seem possible, since they and other developers had already agreed to a spacing of 1 by 1 nautical miles, more than the turbines required—that could allow the project to fit in less area, with a footprint potentially a quarter smaller. That might also mean shorter cabling connecting it all.

Turn It Up: Haliade-X 13 MW Turbine Changes The Game For Offshore Wind

Comments

GE’s Mega Offshore Wind Turbine, When Bigger May Be Better — 2 Comments

  1. Down through the ages, “so large that…” has become a cherished refrain in describing our industrial might. Each “modern age” contributes to the body of work.

    This particular outcome of modernization is truly breathtaking in its dimensions. 🙂

  2. PSE&G had experimented with land based Madras rotors in Burlington, NJ, 1933, the depression years.
    Too bad about The Ultra Large Crude Carrier (ULCC) tanker Seawise Giant, later Knock Nevis, at 565,000 DWT,. I’ll update my records accordingly. .According to JL Radtke’s log log charts ULCC, was the most efficient transportation mode, even more efficient than pipelines..