The world’s largest wind turbine, GE’s 12MW Haliade-X, has been chosen as one of TIME magazine’s 100 best inventions of this year.
The giant offshore wind turbine, which recently commenced testing in the UK, is one of four inventions in the ‘sustainability’ category. The others included an autonomous underwater drone for detecting microplastics in oceans and other bodies of water.
TIME noted that each blade of the “world’s largest offshore wind turbine” stretches more than the length of a football field, and its height tops that of the Washington Monument.
Earlier this month the first Haliade-X nacelle, installed in the port of Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, began turning, producing first power.
A second nacelle recently arrived in the at Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE) Catapult’s facility in north-east England for testing.
According to GE, the nacelle, comparable in size to six double-decker London buses, will undergo full indoor testing as part of an “advanced technology programme” to replicate real-world operational conditions, at the centre in Blyth, Northumberland.
One of the 107-metre blades also arrived at the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center in Boston recently to be exposed to fatigue tests that involve moving it millions of times over the period of a few months to validate that it can withstand more than 25 years of operation at sea.