“There’s a kind of arms race under way,” says Aaron Barr, a principal consultant with research firm Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables. Bigger and Bigger Offshore wind turbines have been growing larger for years as companies develop bigger and bolder designs. That’s helped steadily lower the price of generating power from wind. Powering Up Wind turbines have been getting bigger as industry players vie for ever more powerful designs, climbing from under a megawatt to the brink of the double-digit threshold. Click through to see turbine milestones → 1 of 8 Proposed 12MW turbine GE Haliade-X Turbine height: 260 meters Rotor diameter: 220 meters Source: the companies When the first offshore wind farm, Vindeby, was commissioned in shallow waters off Denmark in 1991, its 450-kilowatt turbines stood 52.5 meters tall and had blades 16 meters long (or about 170 feet tall and 52 feet long). The turbines were designed […]