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US Wind Turbines to Be Taller Than Eiffel Tower

The SUMR project is at conceptual stage.
The SUMR project is at conceptual stage.

Researchers in the US are designing and looking to develop 50-megawatt wind turbines with "extreme-scale blades" 200 meters in length.

To put things in perspective, if built, they will be taller than the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France.

The Segmented Ultralight Morphing Rotor project is being led by researchers at the University of Virginia.

In 2015, the project was awarded a three-year grant of more than $3.5 million by the US Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, CNBC reported.

"It's incredibly challenging, because the scale is so big," the University of Virginia's Eric Loth told CNBC in a phone interview.

"I don't know if I have any other project that I've been working on in the last 30 years that has been … so challenging in that respect," he added.

According to the Global Wind Energy Council, there is now more than 14,000 MW of installed offshore wind power capacity across 14 markets.

Ambitions for the SUMR project are big. On its website, the team says that bringing its project to full fruition will represent "a major step toward maximizing US offshore wind power".

In the US, the offshore wind industry is still in its infancy.

It was only at the end of 2016 that America's first offshore wind farm, located off the coast of Rhode Island, commenced commercial operations.

Looking at the broader picture, the US Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy said offshore wind resources are "abundant, stronger and blow more consistently than land-based wind resources."

Loth said the SUMR project was very much at the conceptual stage. He added that next summer, the team hopes to test a 20% scale version of the turbine on a site just outside of Denver, Colorado.

"Our big push right now is for something called a summer demonstrator," he said. "We're right now designing the blades."

 

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