It’s an exciting technological race with the wind turbines. Just last year China opened a wind farm with another record holding wind turbine:
Chinese wind turbine manufacturer Goldwind and China Three Gorges (CTG) Corporation held a ceremony in the Fujian offshore wind industrial park on 13 October as Goldwind rolled out the nacelle for its first 13.6 MW turbine that will have a rotor diameter of 252 metres.
While Vestas’s and Siemens Gamesa’s currently largest offshore wind turbines have a capacity of 15 MW and 14 MW, respectively, more than Goldwind’s new giant, their rotors stand at “only” 236 metres.
According to the recent update from Siemens Gamesa, its SG 14-236 DD rotor has a 43,500 m2 swept area, which is approximately the size of 6.1 standard football pitches and, according to China Daily, Goldwind’s GWH 252-13.6MW has a swept area of about 50,000 m2 which is “equivalent to 7 standard football fields”.
So different manufacturers have different concepts regarding height, diameter, swept area and of course electricity output. With the tallest and the most swept area not being the one with the highest electricity production.
Also worth noting how much power offshore wind turbines porduce these days. A bit of napkin math using a load factor of 37%, which is rather conservative for the North Sea, I get about 8,800 EU citizens annual electricity consumption from a single turbine. Obviously storage and other source are great as well, but it is really a powerfull technology.
I felt compelled to do more napkin math…
So the population of the EU is 448.4M. If one turbine powers 8,800 citizens, then we need 50,951 total. There are apparently 2,294 that exist so far, so we’re gonna need to build 48,661 more to get to full-wind power.
How fast can they build one?
Actually the EU grid is pretty clean already and there is no need to replace other renewables and nuclear with offshore wind, at least not for climate reasons. Last year it was 38.8% fossil fuel, so we are talking 19,769 offshore wind turbines.
Modern offshore wind park construction ships can install one every day. That is really the problem, you need specialized ships, with trained offshore workers and proper facilities on land.and so forth. Basicly scaling it is not easy. However last year auctions were for 20GW offshore in the North Sea, which are 1333 15MW turbines and this year is going to be more. So we are talking about a bit over a decade maybe. Obviously solar is expanded as well, as is onshore wind.
