Biggest wind turbine and the future of renewable energy!

5 min readMar 30, 2021

During the first six months of 2020. Kanye investors sunk an astonishing 35 billion dollars of their hard-earned loot into forthcoming offshore wind projects. And several similarly eco-friendly schemes have been greenlit since. So now wind power has apparently overcome most if not all of its sceptics! The only question comes in what kind of awesome new tech is all that money being blown on? Let’s discuss the world’s biggest wind turbine.

General electric’s all-new halyard x is an elegant marriage of form and function. If there ever was one rising gracefully some 260 meters above sea level each is capable of generating at least 12 megawatts of energy. With an impressive industry-leading 63 capacity factor above industry standard. That means when fully operational the halyard x will be capable of churning out 67 gigawatt-hours a year. That’s 45% more than the most powerful and efficient windmills operating on the market today.

Capacity Factors

Capacity factor since you ask is a metric that compares how much energy is actually generated over a given spell. Compared to the maximum that could potentially have been generated during that same period. It’s a mathematical wheeze that essentially prices in weather variability a major factor in wind farm development. Obviously, in an ideal world, the wind blows consistently for the entire 20-year lifespan of the turbine. But life’s just not like that in practical terms the juice these mighty machines produce is really quite impressive. It’s estimated that a single halyard x turbine in an offshore setting can generate enough power to supply 16000 European households. A single full turn of the blades on gee’s slightly upgraded 13-megawatt model is enough to supply two whole days of electricity for a typical UK household.

Benefits of wind turbine

Another way of looking at the benefits of wind power is emission reduction. Because they don’t burn fossil fuels obviously the clean energy generated is the equivalent of taking nine thousand cars a year off the roads. Or 42000 metric tons of carbon emissions from the atmosphere and again that’s just for one turbine. Did we mention they’re pretty big! Well, they are as tall as an 85-storey building and each of the halyard’s three individual windmill blades is 107 meters long. To put that into perspective the wingspan of an airbus a380 is only 80 meters. Being this swale isn’t just some hollow clean energy flex it actually makes sense from an engineering point of view. For one thing, installing great forests of these monsters on the seabed is no small undertaking. So the fewer you need to put there the better and cheaper it is for everyone.

Those impressive blades whose tips were along at about 80 meters per second. Cover a so-called swept area of 38000 square meters. That’s the size of seven American football fields by the way. And thanks to the way the area of a circle is worked out pi times the radius squared doubling the length of the blades can actually multiply this all-important swept zone by a factor of 4 bigger. In this case, is clearly way better presently standing proud at mars flaktar in the Dutch port of Rotterdam. The prototype proof of concept haliad x is an inspiring glimpse into the future. Perhaps its most striking early application will be on the vast new 10 billion dollar bank wind farm being developed. To serve the UK market 160 kilometres off the Yorkshire coast out in the north sea.

Phases

Dogger bank will roll out in three stages a b and c. Phases a and b will collectively generate 2400 megawatts from a remarkable 190 halyard x. 13 megawatt offshore turbines scheduled to deliver their first power to the grid as early as 2023 once fully operational. Around 2026 dogger bank will supply around 6 million UK homes the equivalent of five percent of the whole country’s energy consumption. Significantly the final confirmation order for those 190 haliad x turbines landed on gee’s desk. The same day G.E announced it would no longer be supplying power equipment to new coal-fired power plants. The green energy future is here offshore wind projects around the world are now lining up toward a gee’s looming beam off.

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Countries ordering turbine for their energy demands

Energy giant Austin has ordered a raft of them for two of its projects off the east coast of the united states. Swedish utility firm watenfall also announced it will be deploying the 12-megawatt halyard x turbine! For use on its baltic and north sea farms in brazil. The upcoming 702-megawatt arsa branch project will likely make use of them and in china where wind energy is an even bigger deal than in the UK. A dedicated G.E factory is being built purely to serve that key Asia-pacific turbine market.

It’s just as well the orders are flowing in because getting these turbines through development was no easy task for G.E. Which sunk a reported 400 million dollars investment into the scheme of the essential safety certification. This proves they’re worthy of real-world deployment was only issued in November 2020. Following rigorous testing of the 12 megawatt Rotterdam prototype….

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Biggest wind turbine and the future of renewable energy!

Table of contents

Capacity Factors

Benefits of wind turbine

Phases

Countries ordering turbine for their energy demands

Written by Digital Engineer