Pivoting arms could stabilize massive floating offshore wind turbines

As we've discussed many times before, offshore wind represents an enormous opportunity for clean energy, but some of the best resources are out in deep water, where sinking a shaft straight into the sea bed becomes prohibitively expensive and difficult.

Floating offshore platforms offer an alternative, but the engineering challenges here are enormous. A typical 14-megawatt offshore turbine, for example, might place a 500-ton nacelle on top of a 130-meter (427-feet) tower, spinning three 108-meter (354-feet) long carbon blades into the full force of a gale out at sea.

Balancing a monster pinwheel like that on a floating base is no mean feat, and doing it in a way that can easily be manufactured, installed and deployed at low cost? Well, that's a billion-dollar problem that many companies are racing to solve.