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By
Loz Blain
October
22, 2023
Gargantuan 22-MW wind turbine will be among history's
largest machines
The bigger the wind turbine, the better the
production and the economics. Hence, they're scaling up to ludicrous
proportions.
MingYang Smart Energy
Imagine something as tall as New
York's Chrysler building, but spinning. China's Mingyang Smart Energy
has announced plans for a colossal 22-megawatt offshore wind turbine,
and standing in its presence will be an unprecedented human
experience.
The feats of engineering in offshore wind are becoming almost comical
in scale, for a simple reason: the amount of energy you can extract
from a turbine depends mostly on its swept area. The bigger that swept
circle gets, the more energy you can harvest – but also, the greater
the bonus becomes for adding more length.
Put it this way: if your turbine has a 20-meter (85.6-ft) diameter,
and you add one further meter (3.3 ft) to that diameter, you gain
somewhere around 34 square meters (366 sq ft) of additional swept
area. But if your turbine starts with a 50-m (164 ft) diameter, adding
one extra meter of diameter brings in about 79 extra square meters
(850 sq ft) of swept area, since that extra blade length is sweeping a
bigger circle.
What's more, these huge offshore turbines are extremely expensive to
install, and the economics of deployment and grid connection tend to
work in favor of fewer, larger turbines than more, smaller ones.
Thus, the sheer size of these things is getting absolutely nutty. The
H260-18MW turbine currently under construction by CSSC uses 128-m-long
(420-ft) long blades for a ridiculous 260-m (853-ft) diameter and a
53,000-sq-m (570,490-sq-ft) swept area. That's 9.9 NFL football fields
or 42.4 Olympic swimming pools when converted to standard journalistic
units – ignoring the small area left unswept by its hub.
Wind turbines just keep getting bigger – the
MingYang MySE 18.X-28X will rise out of the ocean higher than a
70-story buildingMingYang
MingYang's own typhoon-proof
MYSE 18.X-28X, pictured above, will use 140-m (459-ft) blades for
a swept area of 66,052 sq m (711,000 sq ft, 12.3 NFL fields, 52.8
Olympic swimming pools) – again, minus the hub area.
The new turbine proposed for 2025 by MingYang, according to Bloomberg,
will have a peak output of 22 MW, and a rotor diameter over 310 m
(1,017 ft), corresponding to a swept area of at least 75,477 sq m
(812,425 sq ft, 14.1 NFL football fields, 60 olympic swimming pools),
minus hub.
Add on a little clearance to make sure the blade tips stay out of the
water, and you'll probably be looking at something taller than New
York's 319-m (1,047-ft), 77-story Chrysler Tower, or the 324-m
(1,063-ft) Eiffel Tower in Paris – but spinning. I don't have an
imagination capable of picturing just how awe-inspiring a machine like
this would be at close range.
Indeed, these will be some of the largest moving parts ever built. Can
you think of anything else with visible moving parts this big? Nothing
in the mining mega-machine category comes close, and while the 27-km
(16.6-mile) circumference of the Large Hadron Collider holds the title
of the world's
largest machine overall, it's hidden underground, and particle
acceleration isn't exactly a spectator sport.
So taking a boat ride past these mammoth offshore wind turbines will
be pretty much an unprecedented human experience. It'll be
breathtaking. Sign me up!
Source: Bloomberg
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