Photo: a screenshot of stdaily.com

 
Chinese state-owned energy giant China Huaneng Group unveiled on Thursday the world's most powerful direct-drive floating offshore wind turbine in Fuqing, East China's Fujian Province, the Xinhua News Agency reported.

With a single-unit capacity of 17 megawatts (MW) and a rotor diameter of 262 meters - the largest in the world - the rollout of the equipment marks a new breakthrough in China's offshore wind power exploration, according to China Huaneng.

Additionally, its swept area spans about 53,000 square meters - equivalent to 7.5 standard soccer courts. The hub center stands at a height of roughly 152 meters, comparable to a 50-story residential building.

The turbine also boasts a time-based availability rate exceeding 99 percent. Engineered for extreme conditions, it can withstand massive waves over 24 meters high and endure ferocious typhoons up to level 17 with winds of up to 209 kilometers per hour.

Notably, leveraging domestic innovation, the wind turbine features China's first domestically produced large-diameter main shaft bearing, with all critical components - including blades, generator, converter, and transformer - achieving full localization.

The integration of an intelligent sensing system, which gives operators holistic stability control for the entire floating structure, enables the turbine to adapt to complex deep-sea environments and operate in waters exceeding 50 meters in depth, said Liu Xin, director of Offshore Wind Power at the Huaneng Clean Energy Research Institute. 

With an annual clean energy output of 68 million kilowatt-hours, a single unit can meet the annual electricity demand of about 40,000 households.

The turbine will be towed to waters offshore Yangjiang, South China's Guangdong Province, for trial and validation, the company said.

Lin Boqiang, director of the China Center for Energy Economics Research at Xiamen University, told the Global Times on Thursday that the increasingly larger rotor blades of wind turbines represent a manufacturing feat and can help ensure the highest efficiency for electricity generation.

"This has the practical effect of bringing the cost of electricity generation down, so power companies pursue larger wind turbines," Lin said. "The coast off Fujian has great conditions for offshore wind farm operations and the wind turbines are designed to withstand extreme weather conditions such as typhoons, which are typical to the region."

China's wind power growth remained stable and strong at 80 gigawatts in 2024, according to a report by the International Energy Agency in May.

As a global leader in renewable energy, China's installed renewable energy capacity reached 2.09 billion kilowatts as of May 2025, more than double that in 2020, officials from the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the country's top economic planning agency, said at a press conference on Wednesday.

One in three kilowatt-hours of electricity in the country is now from green sources and China has the world's largest wind turbine installed capacity, according to the NDRC.