Offshore Wind Turbine

An offshore wind turbine is a wind turbine installed in a body of water, almost always the open ocean, rather than on land, a setting that lets turbines grow far larger than an onshore site road and crane access would allow: offshore turbines have reached capacities up to 26 megawatts with blades as long as 153 meters, compared with a maximum of about 15 megawatts and 131 meter blades for the largest onshore machines. Early offshore wind farms, such as the Thorntonbank project off Belgium in the North Sea, used turbines fixed to the seabed on foundations, and floating platforms have since extended the technology into deeper water, letting turbines move further from shore, where they draw less public objection to their visual impact. The cost of building offshore wind capacity has fallen sharply as the industry has scaled up: the global weighted average installation cost per kilowatt dropped 48 percent between 2010 and 2024, from 5,518 dollars per kilowatt to 2,852 dollars per kilowatt. Offshore wind has become one of the fastest growing segments of the wind industry, drawing on the stronger, steadier winds available at sea to generate power at a scale onshore wind farms rarely reach.