Wind

There's an enormous new offshore wind turbine coming up in Denmark courtesy of Siemens Gamesa. But as it turns out, even at 21 MW, it's not nearly big enough to hold a candle to what China's got cooking.

We've already seen cycling computers that sport headlights, cameras and even giant batteries, but Wahoo Fitness may now have them all beat. The company's new "first-in-its-class" Elemnt Ace cyclometer packs an integrated wind speed sensor.

China's Sany Renewable Energy claims it has just erected the world's largest onshore wind turbine. The 15-MW prototype features 430-ft-long blades, making for a maximum swept area of 616,298 sq ft. That's equivalent to nearly 11 football fields.

Aeromine has installed a silent and motionless wind energy harnessing system on the roof of BMW's MINI manufacturing plant in Oxford, UK. They're meant to complement the factory's solar panels to produce clean energy, while taking up a lot less space.

Ever wonder how well your model cars would slice through the air if they were full-scale automobiles? Well, a little something known as the Windsible could tell ya (sort of), as it's touted as being the world's first consumer desktop wind tunnel.

A wildly innovative turbine that could halve the cost of offshore wind is set to go into testing in Norway. The 19-m (62-ft), 30-kW, contra-rotating vertical-axis turbine is a prototype of a design that could scale to unprecedented size and power.

High-altitude platform stations (HAPS) are effective tools for communication and surveillance because they operate from the stratosphere, much closer to earth than satellites. But how do they stay on track?

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.

While wind energy systems can come in some pretty big forms, scientists at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore have developed a small, low-cost device sensitive enough to capture energy from a light breeze.

Early last month, Siemens Gamesa reported that recyclable turbine blades had been successfully installed at the Kaskasi offshore wind farm in the North Sea. Now the company has announced the market availability of an onshore equivalent.

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.