The Chinese wind industry is developing so fast, it is hard to keep track of its progress. Mingyang’s recent announcement of its MySE 18.X-28X turbine with 140 meter blades surprised many with the enormous size of the rotor and scale of its planned power capacity. Few in the wind industry expected to see an offshore turbine which aims to reach 28MW this decade. A survey of 140 foremost experts in the wind industry published in May 2022 found that they expected offshore turbines in 2035 to have 17.1 MW of capacity and rotor diameters of 250 meters in Europe, 15.6 MW and 248 m rotors in North America and 15.0 MW and 220 m rotors in Asia. Less than 10% of the respondents in the survey expected to see offshore turbines 24MW or larger in 2035 and less than 25% expected to see offshore rotor diameters 280 meters or larger in 2035. To say that the announcement of the MySE 18.X-28X took the Western wind industry by surprise is an understatement.

When I started looking into the Chinese turbine manufacturers, I was surprised to discover that the MySE 18.X-28X was just the latest of a whole series of gigantic turbines being planned in China that have gotten little news coverage in the West. I started compiling a list of the biggest offshore wind turbines, and was astounded by how many Chinese models I found which are planned to have higher power capacities and larger rotors than the largest offshore turbines planned by Siemens Gamesa, Vestas and GE. There are a number of web sites that provide listings of the different offshore wind turbine models, such as wind-turbine-models.com, thewindpower.net and c4offshore.com, but I kept finding offshore models which weren’t listed in their databases. In frustration, I started compiled my own list of all the offshore wind turbines that have been announced since the first offshore wind turbine was installed in Sweden in 1990.

The coastal waters of the United States have huge potential to provide wind energy for the East and West Coasts, the Great Lakes, the Western Gulf Coast and Western Hawaii, which are populated regions that often lack good sources of renewable energy. The U.S. Department of Energy calculates that there is potentially 2058 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind that can be exploited in American coastal waters, which would yield 7203 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity per year. The U.S. consumed 3930 TWh in 2021, so offshore wind could generate nearly twice as much electricity as Americans currently consume. That is a conservative estimate considering that it assumes a capacity factor of 40%, but the average capacity factor for the UK’s offshore wind farms is 42.2% and many of the recent farms with 6MW or larger turbines like Hornsea One, Dudgeon, Galloper and Highwind Scotland are seeing capacity factors over 45%.

Despite the enormous potential to develop wind energy in American coastal waters, the US only has two small offshore wind farms currently in operation. The US has so many excellent sources of terrestrial wind, that power companies and energy developers focused on easier spots to place wind farms like the central wind corridor running from the Dakotas down to Northwest Texas. Of the 135,886 MW of wind capacity installed in the US at the end of 2021, only 42 MW of that total came from offshore wind.