Giant offshore wind turbine will feature blades longer than two football fields

• News & Highlights

It's an exciting time in wind energy. We've seen some fascinating new wind technology ideas and countries have been setting new records for wind energy generation. If the new design for a giant offshore wind turbine is any indication, it's only going to get more exciting.

A large team of researchers from the University of Virginia, Sandia National Laboratories, University of Illinois, the University of Colorado, the Colorado School of Mines, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory are working together to build a low-cost 50-MW wind turbine for use offshore. For reference, most wind turbines in use today are 1 to 2 MW and the largest on the market is 8 MW.

In order to have that much energy capacity in a single turbine, it will have to have blades more than 650 feet long, which is longer than the length of two football fields and also two and a half times longer than any existing turbine blade (pictured above is a cross section of a smaller version of the blade the team is working on).

Just building a bigger blade won't work though; it will require a unique design.

“Conventional upwind blades are expensive to manufacture, deploy, and maintain beyond 10-15 MW. They must be stiff to avoid fatigue and eliminate the risk of tower strikes in strong gusts. Those stiff blades are heavy, and their mass, which is directly related to cost, becomes even more problematic at the extreme scale due to gravity loads and other changes,” said Todd Griffith, lead blade designer on the project and technical lead for Sandia’s Offshore Wind Energy Program.