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Comment by Clewza313 | Hacker News Reader

> MingYang says the MySE 16.0-242 is just the start of its "new 15MW+ offshore product platform," and that it's capable of operating installed to the sea floor or on a floating base.

Am I reading that right? A tower 242 meters tall (read: a 70-floor skyscraper), with moving 118 meter blades, and they're proposing anchoring it to a floating base!?

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Granted, it's a factor 2.5 difference in height, 1.6 in rotor radius and 6 in rated power, but Equinor operates a floating wind farm with 100 meter hub height outside of Scotland.

(I'm assuming that the article reported hub height and not the highest point of the rotor).

https://www.equinor.com/en/what-we-do/floating-wind/how-hywi...

Interesting: not a wide base, but instead a very deep one. Build the tower twice as tall, fill the bottom with rocks: now you have a structure whose center of gravity is very low, and the hollow column gives it buoyancy.

Hundred meter turbine just bobbing in the water like a cork.

Yes, floating wind is a growing research area that may be successfully commercialized within the next 10 years. There are a variety of different substructure concepts, some of which have been tried at full-scale, though not quite this large. A recent example is the Tetraspar project [1]. The primary motivation for floating wind is the ability to access areas of the ocean with high levels of wind resources that have water depths which make it uneconomical to construct and install a monopile foundation.

[1] https://www.stiesdal.com/offshore-technologies/the-tetraspar...

Apparently floating these monsters is now a solved problem. But doing maintenance on a 200 m tower bobbing in the waves is still a challenge.

I'm a subscriber so I don't know how soft the paywall is:

https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2021/07/21/...

Why not? It must be a very wide floating base

As some other commenter pointed out, you can just add a counterweight.

Underwater pointing down?

Exactly.

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