Meet a Gargantuan Wind Turbine, the 7-Megawatt V164

The V164-7.0 machine from Vestas Wind Systems, where I worked until last year, would be a great candidate for any Big Engineering show. Wind turbines have been getting bigger for decades, but this machine, designed specifically for offshore locations, dwarfs even today's two-megawatt and three-megawatt turbines.

The 164-meter (538-foot) rotor is enormous. By comparison, the Washington Monument is 169 meters tall, and was the tallest building in the world when completed in 1884. Four 747s parked nose to nose would easily fit inside its massive swept area of 21,124 square meters. Or for baseball fans: you could fit the entire infield and outfield of Yankee stadium inside this rotor. Twice.

The annual output of the V164 is estimated to be 30,000 megawatt-hours, which is roughly equivalent to 2,787 households' electricity consumption.



The Atlantic