Vestas Announces New 7 megawatt offshore wind turbine

(PhysOrg.com) -- Vestas Chief Executive Officer Ditlev Engel announced in London their new V164 wind turbine, designed specifically for offshore wind power. Optimized for conditions in the North Sea, Vestas surprised everyone with their announcement of the new seven megawatt turbine, as the announcement was only expected to be of a six megawatt turbine.

This new turbine is designed to rise 443 feet above the waves, with a rotor blades measuring a full 262 feet. This seven megawatt turbine will far surpass the current turbines offshore, with the majority maxing out at around five megawatts. This turbine will also be the first that is 100 percent dedicated to offshore placement.

Vestas plans to have the first prototype built in the fourth quarter of 2012 and full production is set to begin in the first quarter of 2015.

Wind currently accounts for only two percent of global energy, but Vestas is hoping it to provide at least ten percent in 2020. New installations of offshore turbines surged 51 percent in 2010, but Vestas is hoping for a 70 percent surge this year, with the United Kingdom being the biggest provider of wind turbine energy.

This new turbine will be capable of producing enough electricity for 6,500 homes and will make it capable of generating more electricity that any turbine currently out at sea.

Vestas says that building these turbines at sea is understandably difficult, and given that current wind conditions are changing around the world, the construction and operation could become even more difficult. However, they also say that the biggest advantage to these turbines is that there really is no limit on how big they can get. They do believe, however, that this new V164 turbine will work to see them well beyond 2020.

Production of the large and expensive V164 turbine will be conditional on previous orders of the turbine. Engel says that this will not be a production based on the old-fashioned way of they make it and hope they sell. The investment is just too large. These turbines will essentially be built to order.

Wind turbines may be one of the best renewable energy solutions, but as turbines get larger they also get noisier, become more of an eyesore, and require increasingly larger expanses of land. One solution: ...

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the recent merging wave among european energycompanies sets the stage for giant conglomorates that could lay out the initial investment for these jurassic windfarms, wat I like in the movie, is not only how the sense of scale is given, but also they claim of prodicing 30 percent more power per ton of structural material, this is very important to improve the overall carbon footprint of the windmill and allmost mandatory requirement if we consider that the prices of raw materials etc climbing due to demand from emerging countries

Common 15% photovoltaic cells are up to 120 times as energy dense as a field of these turbines would be at peak power. Even by the time you figure adding 4 times the area to make up for the "less than peak power" for evening, morning, and night, then the solar power would still be at least 10 to 30 times as energy dense in the same area as a field of these turbines.

If you instead used floating solar parabolic trough mirror power plants, you could achieve around 60% to 66% total efficiency during the day which would allow you to produce 2.3 gigawatts during peak power in the same average area of the footprint of a turbine, this is because turbines have to be around 15 blade diameters away from one another to have peak performance due to turbulence issues.

So a floating solar boiler parabolic trough power plant could realistically make around 329 times as much energy per unit area as a wind turbine farm at the same location, even if you figure half the area is wasted for access.