Engineers to develop extreme-scale turbines off the U.S. coast, power 500k homes

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E) has just granted a team of engineers from the University of Virginia and various other U.S. universities a federal grant to develop a forest of giant wind turbines off the coast of Virginia that could provide enough energy to power up to 500,000 homes.

The turbines would also able to protect themselves in severe weather by folding in their rotor blades like palm trees in a hurricane.

The team will use the funding to build a small-scale prototype of the new kind of turbine blades, called Segmented Ultralight Morphing Rotor (SUMR), which are segmented so that the blades can be assembled on site from segments, and ultralight because the blades can adapt to the wind flow, allowing for less structural mass.

The UVA team’s design would be larger than any of the most advanced wind turbines in existence today. Currently, there aren’t even any wind farms located off the shores of the United States. The largest-offshore wind farm has just begun development off the southern coast of the United Kingdom, and is expected to have 32 turbines sized at 8 megawatts each, enough to power 180,000 homes.

The UVA team’s largest  wind turbine in its proposal would generate 50 megawatts of peak power using rotor blades that are as long as two football fields. Although the long blades seem like they would be heavy, the new concept also employs more lightweight materials to combat this.

The engineers have also taken weather resilience into account and will develop the turbines with lightweight trunks that can morph in very high winds and even stow away in the event of a hurricane.

Story via University of Virginia.