China’s Goldwind installed a 16 MW offshore wind turbine in just 24 hours

Chinese wind turbine maker Goldwind has installed its massive 16 megawatt (MW) offshore wind turbine in a “record-breaking” 24 hours.

Goldwind has already brought another of its GWH252-16MW wind turbines online; in September, that turbine set a new world record for electricity generation – in a typhoon – by an individual wind turbine in a 24-hour period. (It produced 384.1 megawatt-hours in 24 hours – enough to power nearly 170,000 homes.)

Goldwind is now getting a whole lot faster at erecting its enormous turbine. The company claimed on LinkedIn today that it “has set a new record for the fastest installation of ultra-large-capacity #offshore units.” It’s not entirely clear what the company meant when it wrote that it achieved the 24-hour installation by “using strategies that preemptively optimized processes through stimulations,” but I’ll assume it meant “simulations.”

At any rate, Goldwind says that the speedy process reduced construction costs and that it’s a method it will be using again. It wrote that it’s a “vital breakthrough for scaling up offshore wind potential in future projects.”

The company also doesn’t say whether the newly built 16 MW offshore wind turbine is at the Zhangpu Liuao Phase 2 offshore wind farm in the southeastern Fujian Province, where the record-breaking electricity-generating turbine is located. State-owned power company China Three Gorges (CTG) is the developer and builder of Zhangpu Liuao Phase 2.

The GWH252-16MW has a rotor diameter of 252 meters (827 feet). It also has a swept area of around 50,000 square meters (538,195 square feet) – the equivalent of seven standard football pitches. The turbine’s hub is 146 meters (479 feet) high – as tall as a 50-story building.

Read more: Meet the ‘world’s first’ floating wind, solar, and fish farm combo

Photo: Goldwind via LinkedIn

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