“Being here to see the turbine’s first steps has been very rewarding.” “This is the first one, but we hope to see hundreds of them very soon,” says Saldana, the GE engineer in charge of commissioning and testing the prototype.
#Prime mover generator#
The machine’s rotor and 12-megawatt (MW) generator can capture and convert enough wind into electricity to supply 16,000 European homes. Still, even the giant vessels that regularly load and unload their cargo at the port seem toylike compared to Maasvlakte 2’s latest attraction, which completes this area’s transformation from coastal shelf to soaring engineering achievement: the first Haliade-X, the world’s most powerful offshore wind turbine. For good reason: It was underwater.īut in 2013, after five years of dredging, Dutch civil engineers opened what is now one of the world’s most modern deepwater shipping terminals. Until recently, the land that’s now Maasvlakte 2, which covers an area nearly six times bigger than New York’s Central Park, was off the map. “Obviously, you can’t hide what we are doing here.” Not anymore, anyways. “It seems like everybody is coming to see us,” Saldana says. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have to worry about crowd management.
Standing at the windswept mouth of the Port of Rotterdam on Maasvlakte 2, an enormous artificial peninsula that juts like a giant lobster claw into the choppy North Sea, Alex Saldana couldn’t be further away from the throngs of tourists strolling past Holland’s picturesque canals and visiting its renowned museums.