This reporting was supported by a Transatlantic Media Fellowship from the Heinrich Boll Foundation.

Picture a buoyant triangular steel or concrete platform roughly the dimensions of a baseball field.  Now place a wind turbine taller than the London Eye on top, connect mooring lines to the seabed and power cables to the grid, and you’ve got a floating wind turbine.

This fantastical-sounding technology is real. At demonstration and small-scale projects in Europe, Asia and a single U.S. site in Maine, floating turbines are producing power. Multiple different platform designs have been field tested, from the aforementioned triangle to a single massive cylinder. But plans to build larger projects of 10 or more turbines, each capable of powering a neighborhood, have lagged behind early projections. 

The business case for floating turbines, as opposed to their fixed-bottom counterparts, boils down to two points: they can do their thing making power farther from shore, where the high winds are and the people generally aren’t. In some places like California, the coastal shelf slopes so steeply that floating wind has been seen as the only option. But the engineering challenges of keeping buoyant, vibrating skyscrapers stable—and the high costs of solving them—serve as a potent counterweight.

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