U.K. To Get World's Largest Turbines

Written by A Siegel

Wednesday, 16 April 2008

Clipper Wind is taking the plunge into a leadership position for offshore wind development. The Britannia project, announced last fall as a path toward testing super-sized offshore wind turbine system, will be announcing the first sale of a 7.5 megawatt wind turbine for deployment and testing in UK waters. These turbines are a touch bigger than Enercon's E-126 turbines. Enercon's turbines max out at about 7 megawatts. Clipper's turbines will take advantage of the high and steady winds of the UK's oceans to pull another 500 kilowatts.

Showing the power of targets for creating opportunities, the UK's aggressive 2020 targets for renewable power and the vision of wind power's central role in meeting these targets has drawn Clipper and other companies into the United Kingdom to help meet the demand signal. To provide scale, the projected power from just one 7.5 Clipper Wind turbine will equal, over one year, one million barrels of oil.

Full Press Release

Comments (4)

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written by tsunamo , April 17, 2008

Hi there,
Doing an honest mathematical operation I think that 1 million barrels per year is totally impossible. If we just suppose that each barrel cost $ 50, we will have a turbine that generates $ 50 million dollars per year, and that's totally impossible, because if we suppose that the turbine costs between 10 and 20 millions (for being one of the first ones built of such capacity) we would have a turbine that pays itself within months, and if that was possible the the world would be right now full of turbines. Thanks, I love your webpage.

Regards from Spain

tsunamo

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written by Earl Killian , April 18, 2008

One barrel of crude has a LHV of 6.1 GJ, or 1.7 MWh, so a million barrels is 1,700,000 MWh. A 7.5 MW turbine operates at say 25% of peak over the year, and so produces 16,425 MWh. So yes, there seems to be a factor of 100 missing here.

It will fall apart
written by Bill , April 19, 2008

Huge turbine blades disintegrate. It's a design problem. Making them bigger doesn't help

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written by WHYNOT? , June 03, 2008

Hey! Is this project going to replace the use of fossil fuel? I like you ideas and plans and do hope it works. I hope I can do a little complaining here. The cost of gasoline today has gotten out of hand. The oil companies are sure filling their pockets and it is very wrong! I think we need to take a stand and all of us that means everyone stop driving their vehicals for one to two days and if we do this it will hurt the oil companys! Is this real? Probely not but it needs to be done!!! TAKE A STAND AGAINST THE OIL COMPANYS!

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A Siegel
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