Sea Power: Most Powerful Wind Turbine Built To Date Picked For Huge U.K. Offshore Farm

GE’s Haliade-X offshore wind turbine was designed to evolve with the market, and evolve it has. The initial model produced 12 megawatts — and even at that level, a single rotation of the machine’s blades could generate enough power for one U.K. household for two days. But when GE Renewable Energy engineers tested a Haliade-X prototype, they found it could be optimized to produce 13 MW. Now an even more powerful version will be rated at 14 MW — and it’s that machine that’s just been selected for Dogger Bank C, the 1.2-gigawatt, third phase of the U.K.’s Dogger Bank wind farm. (At its 13-MW rating, the Haliade-X had previously been selected for the first two phases of the project.)

Set to be completed in 2026, Dogger Bank is projected to be the largest offshore wind installation in the world, with a planned installed generation capacity of 3.6 gigawatts.

GE will also build a new plant in northeast England to produce the world’s longest wind turbine blades to date for the Haliade-X, measuring 107 meters from tip to root. LM Wind Power, a subsidiary of GE Renewable Energy, will build the plant in Teesside, an industrial port on England’s North Sea coast. Workers at the plant, which is scheduled to open in 2023, will supply blades for Haliade-X turbines at the planned Dogger Bank Offshore Wind Farm.

The Haliade-X was also recently selected to power Vineyard Wind, an 800-MW farm off the coast of Massachusetts.