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Allen covers a Vestas turbine on a 199-meter hub in Bavaria, Dominion’s 44 turbines up at Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, an OECD report on Chinese subsidies, and Nordex’s push to keep non-Western turbines out of Europe.
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Episode Transcript
Happy Monday, everyone.
On a hill in southern Germany … a wind turbine tower just climbed higher than any of its kind on land. And the secret is not the steel. It is the truck.
This week, three stories ask the same question. What really limits how fast … and how high … wind can build?
Let’s start in Bavaria. A Vestas turbine now sits on a hub one hundred ninety-nine meters up. The tip reaches two hundred eighty-five meters. Here is the trick. A steel tower has to ride to the site on a truck. It has to fit under highway bridges and around tight curves. That caps most steel towers well below one hundred fifty meters. So the lower two-thirds of this tower is stacked concrete rings. Each ring comes in three curved pieces … small enough to ride on a standard flatbed. Steel cables pull the rings tight. Only the top section is steel. The tower maker is Max Bögl. Vestas plans to put the same turbine in South Australia.
Now let’s head to the coast of Virginia … where the limit is a ship. Dominion Energy says forty-four turbines are now up at Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind. That is one quarter of the total. Every one goes in from a single ship. Charybdis is the first Jones Act turbine installation vessel. It puts in about one turbine every two days. Dominion says that pace has held. The last turbine should go in at the end of next year.
The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development looked at state support for manufacturers from two thousand five through twenty twenty-four. It says Chinese companies got three to eight times more support than companies in OECD countries. Wind turbines are on the list. The Danish Chamber of Commerce calls them wild numbers. It says European turbine makers are not competing with Chinese companies. They are competing with the Chinese state. And Nordex wants non-Western turbine makers kept out of Europe under European cybersecurity rules.
So what should wind professionals take from this?
First … logistics now designs the turbine. The tallest towers will be built from pieces that fit on a truck. Expect blades and nacelles to head the same way.
Second … one ship is a single point of failure. A breakdown or a bad weather season can push an entire American project back by months. Owners and lenders should build that risk into the schedule.
And third … the price gap with China is turning into a security debate. If Europe closes the door … Western turbines will cost more … and owners will pay for trust.
The turbine is no longer the hard part. Everything around it is.
And that is the state of the wind industry for the ninth of November, twenty twenty-six.
