Towering turbines, giant aircraft and 'staggering' losses: Recharge’s best read of 2024
Renewable energy mega-plants, spectacular blade breaks and a drone attack also caught readers’ attention this year
Mingyang's record-breaking 20MW wind turbine prototype, a start-up's plan to build the biggest-ever aircraft to fly huge turbine blades by air and concerns over the impact of wind wakes on offshore wind farms were the subject of some of Recharge's best read stories in 2024.Photo: Mingyang/Radia/Orsted
The relentless wind industry arms race, a plan to build the biggest-ever aircraft to fly huge turbine blades by air and “staggering” losses from wind wakes provided some of Recharge’s best-read articles of the year, along with some ruthless decision-making from Orsted and GE Vernova.
The Western wind sector has continued to grapple with inflation, interest rates and supply chain pressures this year, with profitability the byword as developers and manufacturers made difficult decisions in their quest to get back to black.
Others of our best-read articles of 2024 concern stories that were less expected, like why a wind developer is planning to build the biggest airplane ever made, and a drone attack downing a turbine.
Wind turbines have come to be a symbol of resilience for Ukraine’s energy sector after almost three years of Russia relentlessly targeting its power assets with missile and drone attacks.
Knocking out a wind farm spread over tens of kilometres is much harder than delivering a single and potentially decisive strike on a thermoelectric plant, for example, which is perhaps why Russia has largely not targeted turbines in Ukraine.
One 5.5MW GE Vernova turbine was not so lucky, however, when it was brought down by a Russian drone in January. That has not clouded the growing importance of wind power to Ukraine, which has this year set ambitious targets for both onshore and offshore generation.
A missile near a wind farm in Ukraine.Photo: Ukrainian Wind Energy Association
Rare is it that more than a few months go by without news that a Chinese manufacturer plans to build a new staggeringly powerful wind turbine.
Rarer still is news that a Western player plans to turn the tables and build what it hopes to be the “world’s most powerful” wind turbine, which is perhaps why an announcement in January that Siemens Gamesa planned to do just that drew so much attention.
This was a story that bookended 2024, as December sightings of the monster machine’s components being transported across Denmark to the Østerild test centre turned heads and left jaws agape.
The turbine reportedly has a 21MW power rating, a massive jump from Siemens Gamesa’s current most powerful at 15MW. The biggest on Earth it is not, however, with the Chinese unveiling a series of machines up to a goliath 26MW in recent months.
Siemens Gamesa was spotted transporting a very large nacelle across Denmark in December.Photo: Jochen Abitz
Another January story with Siemens Gamesa turbines at its heart came as Norwegian energy giant Equinor revealed it would tow all five floating wind turbines from its pioneering Hywind Scotland project back to Norway for “heavy maintenance.”
The 6MW turbines were taken to Wergeland on Norway’s west coast as part of a maintenance programme at the world’s first-ever commercial floating wind farm.
Nine months later, the turbines were back up and running, with Equinor revealing that repairs had included replacing the main bearings. In the future, dragging turbines back to shore may not be necessary, as 2024 also saw the first major floating wind component swap at sea.
Orsted had suffered a torrid 2023 in which it cancelled two gigascale US offshore wind projects at a cost of $4bn, prompting high-level departures at the Danish renewables giant.
The developer took “uncompromising” action to turn the ship around in February when it unveiled a major downgrade in its ambitions, including a reduced renewables build target, job cuts and an exit from some markets to help it bounce back to profit this year.
The Western wind sector has become increasingly accustomed to seeing major offshore projects in distress in recent years in the face of inflation and supply chain pressures. What it had not seen was an entire procurement round folding after a manufacturer changed its mind about developing a particular turbine.
But this was exactly what happened when GE Vernova dropped plans for an 18MW Haliade-X machine, throwing projects that had planned to use it into turmoil and prompting New York authorities to abandon its 4GW Round 3, which was badly affected.
GE Vernova was unrepentant, claiming the round was doomed anyway. Many of the developers, including TotalEnergies and RWE, have since rebid into a new round as New York looks to make up lost ground on its target of hitting 9GW of offshore wind capacity by 2035.
Aerospace ideas “always seem outlandish” until someone pulls them off, Mark Lundstrom, CEO of US start-up Radia, told Recharge in June. And a plan to build the world’s biggest-ever airplane to transport massive wind turbine blades certainly sounds outlandish.
Entrepreneur and aerospace engineer Lundstrom argues that such an airplane could transform the onshore wind industry, which is currently hamstrung by difficulties in transporting the largest blades by land – one reason that the largest turbines are typically found offshore.
After many years working in “stealth mode,” as per standard start-up parlance, Radia has pulled in over $100m in investment and started naming its first suppliers as it looks to get its airplane idea off the ground.
Imagery of a future Radia 'WindRunner' aircraft unloading a turbine blade on a remote project site that it would be impossible to otherwise transport the component to.Photo: Radia
Growing industry attention and concern about inter-farm wind wakes was reflected by interest in an in-depth Recharge report on “frightening” new data on the impact these could have on projects, particularly offshore.
Atmospheric scientists warned wind wakes stretch further and have greater impacts than many industry standard models predict, with the potential to “destroy” the financials of projects, which leading lawyers warned may have little to no legal protection from ‘wind theft,’ as it is sometimes known.
Recharge later revealed that the prospect of developer disputes over wind wakes is no longer theoretical, with a who’s who of global power giants already fighting over the issue as they try to protect their existing assets from new planned projects.
The combination of a US tech giant, an Indian tycoon and a renewables mega-plant formed a story that caught the attention of many in October.
Google entered a deal to tap capacity at the planned 30GW Khavda project being developed over 500km2 by the renewables business of Indian billionaire Gautam Adani to power its data centre operations in India.
Adani has had a turbulent few years. After seeming to have recovered from fraud allegations raised against his Adani Group last year, US authorities personally charged him over an alleged renewables bribery plot in November.
If a 30GW renewables project five times the size of Paris is impressive, how about a 70GW project that will be bigger than entire countries?
This is the mind-boggling plan that developers have hatched for vast expanses of land in Western Australia. The Western Green Energy Hub will be spread across 22,700km2 of southern coastal desert land, an area bigger than countries including Slovenia and El Salvador.
The proposed project would be developed in seven stages over around three decades, with a final output comparable to Australia’s current total power generation.
There was undoubted schadenfreude from some in the Western wind industry when news and video reports broke that two blades had detached from a 20MW Mingyang prototype turbine in China.
This towering machine, the largest on earth with a 292-metre rotor diameter, was installed by Mingyang in August in yet another marker of how far the Chinese have pulled ahead of the West on turbine size.
Mingyang later confirmed that blades on a giant prototype machine had fractured under “extreme, abnormal conditions” during the testing process, offering valuable insights as it refines the new model.
