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Offshore wind turbines already have a size advantage over their land-based counterparts, and it’s about to get bigger. A team of researchers spearheaded by the University of Virginia is cooking up plans for a massive, 25-megawatt wind turbine, towards an ultimate goal of 50 megawatts. The aim is to trim the cost of offshore wind for energy-hungry coastal states, here in the US (one can only hope) and around the world (already happening).
World’s Biggest Offshore Wind Turbines Are Getting Bigger
Offshore wind turbines can reach extreme proportions partly on account of their superior transportability. Land-based turbine blades and tower components can only grow so big before they get stuck in tunnels or under bridges, or tied up trying to navigate a sharp curve in the road.
The open ocean is a different matter. Many seaports are already equipped to handle supersized construction projects, bridge height is generally not an obstacle, and tunnels are irrelevant to water routes.
The pursuit of larger turbines is a bottom line priority for offshore developers because they can populate an offshore site with fewer turbines to reach the same capacity, helping to push costs down. And, turbine manufacturers are responding. Back in 2015 the typical offshore wind turbine clocked in at less than 10 megawatts. The bar has been raised much higher, with Siemens-Gamesa being one example. The company just inked a deal with ScottishPower topping £1 billion, for the delivery of 64 14-megawatt offshore turbines to a wind farm in the North Sea.
That’s peanuts compared to a 26-megawatt behemoth that China’s Dongfang Electric Corporation unveiled last month. The company also launched an 18-megawatt demonstration turbine over the summer.
How About 50 Megawatts?
Offshore wind stakeholders were already looking to go bigger years before Dongang launched its 26-megawatt monster. Heading the effort up in the US is a research team at the University of Virginia under the leadership of Engineering Professor Eric Loth. The 50-megawatt goal appears in a project called Segmented Ultralight Morphing Rotor. The blades deploy lightweight materials and a segmented design to change shape as they move.
The Energy Department began supporting the project in 2015 with a $5.5 million grant through its ARPA-E office for funding high risk, high reward energy innovations. “This technology can dramatically reduce the cost of wind energy production, helping to lower the cost of power generation for consumers with no carbon generation or emissions,” ARPA-E explained.
Researchers from University of Illinois, the University of Colorado, the Colorado School of Mines, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories all participated in the launch of the Morphing Rotor project, along with the private sector wind industry stakeholders Dominion Resources, General Electric, Siemens and Vestas.
New Offshore Wind Turbines Hit The 53.38 Kilowatt Mark
The Morphing Rotor project also incorporated small- and medium-step goals in it target range, with 50 megawatts at the top. “The largest of the UVA team’s wind turbine designs would each produce 50 megawatts of peak power using rotor blades as long as two football fields,” explained Virginia University writer Elizabeth Thiel Mather in an article posted on December 11, 2015.
“The 50 MW turbine design could enable a 10x increase in power compared to today’s largest production turbines,” adds ARPA-E. “The 200-meter long blades can be fabricated in five to seven segments, and assembled at the point of use.” That includes locations on land as well as sea, though offshore deployment provides more opportunities for scale-up.
The ARPA-E grant kicked off a respectable amount of media attention for the project at its launch. The wheels of science turn slowly and attention soon turned elsewhere, but the research collaboration kept hammering away. One key milestone was the fabrication of a 53.38 kilowatt demonstrator (that’s kilowatts, not megawatts) aimed at collecting real-world data to measure how a turbine sporting lightweight, flexible blades responds to changing wind conditions, leading to the development of new controllers.
“One of the trickiest elements of wind energy generation is dealing with not enough or too much wind at one time. When wind speeds are too low, a turbine can’t produce a useful amount of energy. When gusts are too fast, they can push the limits of a turbine’s capacity, causing it to shut down to avoid a system overload,” noted writer CU Today in June of 2022.
“The inconsistency of wind speed has plagued wind energy since its inception; the lost time spent shutting down the system leads to less energy generated and less efficient production,” Simpkins added.
How Big Can Offshore Wind Turbines Go?
The wind speed issue is especially tricky for turbines that deploy just two blades in stead of the conventional three-bladed turbine design. Two-blade wind turbines can face downwind. That provides for more design flexibility, as there is little or no likelihood that the blades could collide with the turbine tower. It also raises the potential for cutting costs by reducing the mass of the turbine. The bigger the turbine, the greater the savings.
“The advantage of the downwind configuration…really comes about when you get to extreme scale turbines, and those are primarily for offshore,” explained Professor Lucy Pao, the Palmer Endowed Chair in the school’s Department of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering, in an update of a Morphing Rotor project posted in 2022.
In a more recent development, last month the University of Virginia reported on a collaboration between Loth and his graduate research assistant Michael Jeong, who is credited as lead author on a study of a new 25-megawatt rotor design, published in the journal Applied Energy earlier this year. “The research takes into account the complex fluid-structure dynamics that become critical at these extreme scales,” the school explained, noting that the research team included NREL, Washington State Universit,y and the University of Illinois.
“Our research focuses on designing cost-efficient wind turbine rotors at unprecedented sizes, meant to operate offshore where winds are stronger,” Jeong explained. “Models like 25 MW Segmented Ultralight Morphing Rotor (SUMR) envisioned by Professor Loth are among the largest designs to be published and promise high energy capture while optimizing costs.”
One Step Forward, Two Steps … Forward?
If the Morphing Rotor project bears fruit, offshore wind developers in the US can look forward to a more favorable environment for coastal community stakeholder engagement, partly due the prospect of saving money on utility bills. Also helping to smooth things over is the potential to harvest the same amount of energy in a given area with fewer wind turbines, helping to alleviate both environmental and aesthetic concerns.
Of course, that also depends on the direction of federal energy policy over the next four years. Interior Department Secretary Deb Haaland has already sketched out a plan for up to 12 new federal lease areas through 2028, but anything could happen after Inauguration Day on January 21. If you have any thoughts about that, drop a note in the comment thread.
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Image (cropped): A new wave of supersized, morphing wind turbines will help cut costs for the US offshore wind industry, if it can survive the next four years (courtesy of NREL).
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