European Wind Turbine Sets New World Record
- Editor OGN Daily
- 54 minutes ago
- 1 min read
China, at least for a while, has just taken a back seat to European wind company Siemens Gamesa.
The Siemens SG DD-276 turbine, off the coast of Denmark, measures a whopping 905ft (276 m) from blade tip to blade tip. Equivalent to spanning over three football fields. It's rated at an astonishing capacity of 21.5 MW capacity - which could generate enough electricity to power 70,000 Danish homes per year. Over its lifetime, it's expected to save about 55,454 tons of CO2 emissions compared to fossil fuel alternatives.
Siemens Gamesa has been installing wind turbines since 1991, including having planted 11 turbines into the world's very first offshore wind farm at Vindeby, Denmark. The SG DD-276 marks the 5,000th turbine the company has erected across 14 countries.
Until this humungous new Siemens turbine was installed, China's Mingyang Smart Energy previously had the record for about seven months - at 20MW. However, in the fast-moving winds of change where bigger is better, these records are often short-lived.
Indeed, Siemens knows that its record breaking turbine won't have much time to rest on its laurels as another Chinese company has already announced the completion of a 26 MW behemoth - but it hasn't yet been installed.