© 2024 New Atlas
Energy

Vestas reveals offshore turbine with world's largest sweep

By Paul Ridden
February 11, 2021
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Flipboard
  • LinkedIn
The Vestas V236-15.0 MW offshore turbine will go into prototyping in 2022, followed by serial production in 2024
Vestas
The Vestas V236-15.0 MW offshore turbine will go into prototyping in 2022, followed by serial production in 2024
Vestas

Denmark's Vestas is looking to become an industry leader in offshore wind, and has introduced the V236-15.0 MW turbine to take the fight to GE. The new design's blades offer the largest swept area in the world.

Vestas got into the offshore turbine business over 25 years ago with the installation of 500-kW V39 units at Denmark's Tunoe Knob wind farm. The size and energy production capacities of turbines has grown steadily ever since, with GE Renewable Energy recently announcing that its world-beating 14-MW Haliade-X will be part of phase C of the Dogger Bank offshore wind project due for completion in 2026. Now Vestas has gone even bigger.

Thanks to its three 115.5-m (379-ft) blades, the new design is reported to have the largest swept area in the world, which adds up to 43,742 m2. It should be good for sites where wind speeds are high too, with Vestas saying that it's "rated to withstand IEC 1 extreme wind conditions up to 50 m/s and IEC T up to 57 m/s."

Each turbine is expected to deliver around 80 GWh of energy per year, depending on site-specific conditions, which is said to work out as being enough to power 20,000 European homes.

The V236-15.0 MW also offers the potential to reduce the number of turbines deployed at offshore windfarm level – with Vestas calculating that the "offshore turbine offers 65 percent higher annual energy production than the V173-9.5 MW, and for a 900-MW wind park it boosts production by five percent with 34 fewer turbines."

The company expects the first V236-15.0 MW prototype to be built in 2022, with serial production following two years later. It has a design lifetime of 25 years.

“With the V236-15.0 MW, we raise the bar in terms of technological innovation and industrialization in the wind energy industry, in favor of building scale," says Anders Nielsen, Vestas CTO. "By leveraging Vestas’ extensive proven technology, the new platform combines innovation with certainty to offer industry-leading performance while reaping the benefits of building on the supply chain of our entire product portfolio. The new offshore platform forms a solid foundation for future products and upgrades.”

Source: Vestas

Tags

EnergyVestasTurbineOffshore WindWind turbineWindRenewable EnergyNew Atlas Audio
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Flipboard
  • LinkedIn
Paul Ridden
While Paul is loath to reveal his age, he will admit to cutting his IT teeth on a TRS-80 (although he won't say which version). An obsessive fascination with computer technology blossomed from hobby into career before hopping over to France for 10 years, where he started work for New Atlas in 2009. Now back in his native Blighty, he serves as Managing Editor in Europe.
14 comments
paul314
How many seabirds is that? At even 1 rpm the tips are moving upwards of 10 m/s.
Lamar Havard
Will these blades also be relegated to landfills after their working life, or breakage like the non-recyclable ones we're dealing with now?
Spud Murphy
Lamar, the same applies to the millions of fibreglass boats out there, the millions of surfboards and kayaks, and all of the other composite objects that are manufactured that actually don't need to be (the vast majority of owners don't need a surfboard or watercraft, they want them). Stop those first before worrying about wind turbine blades, which we actually need. Besides, the materials in even one blade are worth a lot of money, I would be surprised if the big turbine manufacturers didn't already have or are not working on recycling systems for them.
Hages63
paul314, really is that all you are concerned about? And Lamar instead of putting all of your energy into dragging these brilliant pieces of technology into the mud, why dont you expend some of that energy into maybe solving the "non-recyclable" issue of the blades. Or is that maybe too difficult for someone like you sir?
Chris Coles
Someone needs to be reminded that we are living on a rotating ball of mass, rotating at ~1,000 miles per hour, where there must be the potential for such massive turbines to in some way modify the rotational characteristics of the rotation of that mass. That they need to read earth's Shifting Crust by Charles Hapgood. We may be creating circumstances that would cause the crust to once again shift, and that just might leave us to regret the construction of these monster turbines.
anthony88
Oh no! Think of the waste these monster turbines will create at the end of their serviceable life! We should continue building power plants that burn fossil fuels to avoid this catastrophe!
Warky1
They still present a blight on the horizons anywhere!
Catweazle
"Each turbine is expected to deliver around 80 GWh of energy per year..."
Every mWh of which has to be backed up by a mWh of conventional - either fossil or nuclear fuelled - generation capacity.
Wavmakr
For all who like documentation(aka..Science) check out this link. Eye opening for this subject. https://stopthesethings.com/2020/01/26/toxic-shock-millions-of-wind-turbine-blades-leave-poisoned-landfill-legacy-for-generations-to-come/
Hages63
@Chris Coles. Perhaps we should cut down all of the trees and smooth out all of the mountains ranges flatten all of the structures that have been built, buildings, big dams, monstrous shopping malls and huge bridges as well so that the earth doesn't alter its rotational speed and send us all flying off into the vacuum of space, yeah?
Most Viewed