World’s biggest offshore wind turbine rolls off production line

The offshore wind industry has marked a new milestone this week, with the world’s most powerful turbine – a 16MW giant from Goldwind and China Three Gorges – rolling off the production line in east China’s Fujian province.

The milestone achievement was Tweeted by CTG on Wednesday, boasting the turbine’s world-topping per-unit capacity, its 146 metre hub and its impeller diameter of 252 metres, all while being the world’s lightest unit per MW weight.

CTG says that, at full wind speed, the turbine can generate 34.2kWh of power after rotating a full turn.

The annual output of just one of the offshore turbines, estimated to average over 66 million kWh, can meet the annual demand of 36,000 households, “save 22K tonnes of standard coal, and reduce 54K tonnes of CO2,” the Tweets said.

The new offshore turbine is the world’s largest per-unit capacity by some way, a full 2MW ahead of Siemens Gamesa’s 14MW offshore turbine, a prototype of which was installed in September 2021.

GE is using 13MW Haliade-X units for the massive 3.6GW Dogger Bank offshore wind project in the UK. While the Siemens Gamesa 11MW wind turbines are the biggest to be actually installed at a commercial scale to date.

“The successful roll-out of the 16MW unit marks that my country’s wind power equipment industry has achieved a historic leap from ‘following’ to ‘running alongside’ and then to ‘leading’, creating the latest benchmark for the development of global offshore wind power equipment,” said CTG chairman Lei Mingshan.

He added that the massive new turbine has “overcome a series of key technological problems,” including ultra-long flexible blades, large spindle bearings, and miniaturisation of ultra-large capacity generators.

“The application of high-power offshore wind turbine can greatly save the use of sea areas,” Lei Mingshan said.

Goldwind chief engineer Zhai Endi added: “The 16MW unit has made important technological breakthroughs in the R&D and manufacturing of key core components such as large main shaft bearings and ultra-long lightweight blades.”

The two Chinese companies say the design of the unit can actively adjust the operation mode for typhoons and other adverse conditions to ensure safe and efficient power generation.