Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in 2012, highlighting Siemens’ ambitious project to build what was then the world’s largest offshore wind turbine.
Clean wind power is rapidly becoming one of the absolute largest, most reliable renewable energy sources currently in the modern world. Intense current global research on massive wind turbines heavily focuses on efficiently extracting the absolute maximum electrical power possible directly from the moving wind. Entirely new, massive wind turbines have actively been designed specifically to fully meet these growing global requirements.
The Massive 6MW Siemens Turbine
For example, highly advanced airborne wind turbine technology is perfectly suitable for harvesting high altitude winds. Now, Siemens, a massive German multinational conglomerate company, proudly working closely along with DONG Energy, is actively building the absolute largest offshore wind turbine, boasting incredible spinning blades with a staggering length of exactly 75 metres.
The gigantic wind turbine is officially planned to be safely installed directly off the rough Britain coast starting from early 2014. The huge composite blades are amazingly only slightly smaller than the massive Airbus A380 passenger jet’s wingspan, which is an incredible 79.8 metres. Each single blade is meticulously made from two enormous pieces of ultra-lightweight carbon fibre.
Scale and Power Output
The total spinning rotor diameter is a massive 154 metres and physically has a huge swept area of roughly 18,600 square metres. According to official estimates by Siemens, it can easily generate up to an incredible 6MW of clean electricity, which can comfortably supply enough daily power to roughly 6,000 standard households.
It absolutely requires a highly specialised, extra-long heavy truck to safely transport these massive blades directly to their final place of installation, which is often at a very vast distance away from the main manufacturing factory.
The Future of Offshore Wind
These massive offshore wind turbines are inherently highly capable of steadily producing significantly more total energy than standard onshore wind turbines. Many prominent European countries are aggressively looking heavily forward into expanding offshore power generation specifically to successfully meet their massive future energy requirements.
Credits: Siemens, DONG Energy
