China Unveils World's Largest Offshore Wind Turbine.
Notes from an Environmentalist.
GE Verona’s wind turbine nacelle
Nacelle of The Dongfang wind turbine dwarfs workers.
The World’s Largest Wind Turbine
Built in China
October 12, 2024
In early October the BOEM approved plans for the company, U.S. Wind, to build a floating wind farm in Baltimore Harbor. The farm would consist of 114 turbines and produce enough energy to power 770,000 homes.
It was one of the last links in the chain of wind projects planned for almost every state on the East Coast, except for Florida where Governor DeSantis had been grandstanding against building any windmill that might detract from his buddy, Donald Trump’s view from Mar-a-Lago.
But the Chinese firm Dongfang threw shade on Maryland’s news when it made its October 12 surprise announcement that it had just built the world’s largest wind turbine that would dwarf GE Verona’s Haliade-X Turbines that kept shedding their elegant but fragile blades.
The Dongfang turbine would stand 535 feet tall and sweep an area the size of ten football fields and was designed to withstand the typhoons of the South China Sea.
Dongfang claimed that the turbine’s large size would allow developers to reduce their costs enough to compete with fossil fuels and would allow China to meet its goal for reducing their emissions 30% by 2030.
The same goal seemed to be slipping further out of reach as the United States approached its November 4th Presidential election.