Wind turbine

We haven't seen a floating offshore wind turbine like this before. Touchwind claims its innovative single-blade turbines will solve several problems to drive down cost and downtime, using a single, huge blade with no fancy active pitch controls.

One inconvenient truth for the clean energy industry – and a source of seemingly great concern to the fossil fuel lobby – is the indisputable fact that wind turbines kill birds. Researchers say smarter turbines could dramatically cut the toll.

Three Gorges Energy has connected the world's first 16-megawatt monster offshore wind turbine to the power grid. With a mind-boggling 260-meter (853-ft) rotor diameter, this towering colossus will supply clean energy for about 36,000 Chinese homes.

Irish company Gazelle has announced the third generation of a fascinating new floating wind platform design it says can stabiliize massive offshore turbines up to 20 MW in capacity, while radically reducing weight, cost and sea floor cable tension.

Denver's Keystone Tower Systems says it can cut the cost of wind energy with tech borrowed from pipemaking. It uses spiral welding techniques to roll sheet steel into huge turbine towers on-site, stronger, faster and cheaper than current techniques.

When a wind turbine reaches the end of its working life, some components can be recycled but blades often end up in landfill. Vestas is looking to commercialize a new chemical process that can break down all epoxy-based turbine blades for reuse.

Extreme engineering is becoming the norm as offshore wind continues to scale up. Sweeping the area of 12.3 standard NFL fields each rotation, with gargantuan 140-meter (459-ft) blades, the MySE 18.X-28X will be the largest wind turbine ever built.

The China State Shipbuilding Corporation (CSSC) is upping the ante on offshore wind, announcing it's building the largest and most powerful wind turbine ever, making a peak 18 megawatts with an enormous 260-m (853-ft) diameter on its three-bladed rotor.

Wind energy is often thought of as "clean" but, in fact, the technology has the blood of thousands (if not millions) of bats on its hands. A new drone-mounted system shows promise in rerouting some bats above the turbine blades and away from danger.

Floating wind turbines are crucial to the future of offshore wind, but they require radically different thinking. French company Eolink is building a full-scale pyramid-style floating wind turbine that reduces materials and weight by more than 30%.

Aeromine says its unique "motionless" rooftop wind generators deliver up to 50% more energy than a solar array of the same price, while taking up just 10% of the roof space and operating more or less silently. In independent tests, they seem legit.

A prototype wind turbine has recorded an extraordinary single-day renewable energy production total, bringing in a massive 359 megawatt-hours in a 24-hour time period. To get there, it had to operate over its rated capacity, essentially all day long.