The world's largest wind turbine: 26 MW.
Over its lifetime, it will generate as much electricity as burning ~750,000 tonnes of coal.
That's roughly 44,000 truckloads of coal that never need to be mined, transported, shipped, burned, or paid for.
To put its scale into perspective, around 60 of these turbines can generate as much electricity each year as a large 1 GW nuclear reactor, after accounting for real-world capacity factors.
Those ~60 turbines would cost around US$4–5 billion installed — broadly comparable to lower-cost nuclear builds, and around two to three times cheaper than most recent Western nuclear projects.
They can also typically be deployed in 1–3 years, versus 7–12 years for most new nuclear projects, and can be built incrementally rather than all at once.
Nuclear plants provide continuous output and generally require less routine maintenance per unit of energy, while offshore wind requires more frequent servicing but no fuel, no refuelling outages, and far smaller operating teams.
The remarkable part?
In many markets, the electricity produced by modern offshore wind is already among the cheapest ever generated.
Imagine explaining to someone in 1900 that a few dozen machines, spinning quietly in the ocean, could match the annual output of a nuclear power station while avoiding the combustion of nearly a million tonnes of fuel.
#Bettrification
