Haliade-X offshore wind turbine becomes operational at Dogger Bank 

On Oct. 10, GE Vernova’s Offshore Wind business (Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S. and Teesside, U.K.) announced that its first ever Haliade-X offshore wind turbine installed at sea began producing power as part of the Dogger Bank Wind Farm located 130 kilometers off the U.K. coast. The turbine was one of the first of the next-generation wind turbine generators at 13-plus megawatts (MW) to become operational at sea and the largest ever installed in European waters, according to the company.

The 13-MW Haliade-X turbine is the first of 277 turbines that will be installed at the 3.6-gigawatt (GW) Dogger Bank Wind Farm. The project, being built in three phases — Dogger Bank A, B and C, — will use a mix of 13- and 14-MW Haliade-X turbines to power the equivalent of 6 million U.K. households or about 5% of the U.K.’s electricity demand.

“Energizing the first Haliade-X at sea is another important step in the evolution of the offshore wind industry,” Jan Kjaersgaard, GE Vernova’s Offshore Wind business CEO, says. “The Haliade-X was designed to provide clean, reliable renewable energy at scale to projects such as Dogger Bank.”

The Haliade-X was introduced in 2018 as a 12-MW+ offshore wind turbine. It was designed as part of a platform that enabled it to evolve to meet the industry’s need for more efficient turbines capable of producing more power with the same amount of wind.

In developing the Haliade-X, GE Vernova’s Offshore Wind business relied on collaboration across the GE portfolio, leveraging the knowledge of GE Onshore Wind, LM Wind Power, GE Power, GE Aviation, GE Digital and the company’s Global Research Center.

A prototype of the Haliade-X has been operating on land in the port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands for more than 3 years. The Haliade-X received independent certification from DNV (Høvik, Norway) to operate at up to 14.7 MW as a result of extensive testing conducted on the prototype.

In addition to supplying power to the historic Dogger Bank Wind Farm, the Haliade-X will also be used as part of the 800-MW Vineyard Wind project that will reportedly become the first utility-scale wind farm in the U.S. and the Ocean Wind I project in New Jersey.