Wind turbine

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.

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.

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.

Swedish company SeaTwirl says its floating vertical-axis wind turbines have what it takes to dramatically reduce the cost of deep offshore wind energy, and it's signed a deal with Westcon to build and deploy a commercial-scale 1-MW turbine in Norway.

Boston startup T-Omega Wind says it's prototyped and tested a unique floating offshore wind turbine that can withstand massive storms, but at 20% the weight and around 30% the price of conventional designs, unlocking the world's best wind resources.

We interviewed the core team at Norway's World Wide Wind to learn more about its floating, tilting, contra-rotating, double turbine design, which it says can unlock unprecedented scale, power and density to radically lower the cost of offshore wind.

Norway's World Wide Wind has a radically different take on offshore wind power. These floating, vertical-axis wind turbines feature two sets of blades, tuned to contra-rotate – and they promise more than double the output of today's biggest turbines.

Through its massive wind turbines and innovative offshore designs, GE continues sharpening its toolkit in a bid to built the future of sustainable energy, and a newly unveiled turbine blade shows how that can extend to the materials used.