Offshore wind is becoming a major industry and the latest turbines are capable of providing huge amounts of clean electricity.

Offshore wind is becoming a major industry and the latest turbines are capable of providing huge amounts of clean electricity.

GE Renewable Energy is contributing to this progress by launching what will be the largest offshore wind turbine in the world, the Haliade-X.

Innovations like this are helping to advance the technology at a breakneck speed. The new turbine will have a capacity of 12 megawatts (MW), outstripping the current record which stands at 9.5 megawatts.

This means each turbine alone will be able to power 16,000 households a year. Each one will be a massive 260 meters high, which is nearly three times taller than Big Ben.

To put this into perspective, the first offshore wind farm was built in Denmark in 1991 and had turbines of 450 kilowatts each. The new GE model is, therefore, 26 times more powerful than the first generation.

GE claims that the new Haliade-X will be able to produce 45 percent more electricity than what’s currently on the market, and that it will invest $400 million to help develop the turbine. It’s aiming to complete the first units by 2021.

Jérôme Pécresse, President and CEO of GE Renewable Energy said, that "the renewables industry took more than 20 years to install the first 17 gigawatts of offshore wind. Today, the industry forecasts that it will install more than 90 gigawatts over the next 12 years. This is being driven by lower cost of electricity from scale and technology”

“The Haliade-X shows GE's commitment to the offshore wind segment and will set a new benchmark for cost of electricity, thus driving more offshore growth", he added.

The largest offshore wind farm in the world is currently the London Array in the Thames Estuary. The project’s maximum capacity of 660 MW is soon to be beaten by a host of bigger wind farms on the horizon, most of which are in the UK. These include the two Hornsea projects off the coast of Yorkshire, at 1,200 MW and 1,800 MW.

Photo Credit: GE Renewable Energy