Eons ago, the world's biggest wind turbine

It's now more than twenty-five years since the biggest wind turbine in the world, at that time, was spinning in . . . can you guess where? Denmark? The USA? China? Spain? Germany?

Nope. Sweden. Outside the tiny hamlet of Maglarp, on the southern tip of this Nordic country, the WTS 3, was built by Wind Turbine Systems, which was part of the Swedish state-owned Swedyard Group of Ship Yards. It was one of a half-dozen or so research prototypes built mainly in the 1980s. It was designed to generate 3 MW of electricity, but often produced more. I remember visiting it, where it stood all by itself in the middle of a grain field, just a few kilometres from the seashore, and it was huge. I was flabbergasted that the equivalent of a Boeing 747's wingspan was sitting up there on its tower, spinning it's two enormous blades in the wind. Yes, it had only two blades, and it had a lot of problems; its designers learned a lot, but went on to other things. Along with most of the rest of its tiny family of wind turbines, it was dismantled in the mid-1990s, and wind power faded mostly away from Sweden for most of the next ten years. That was an institutionalized, state-run failure, with little support from the high-tech nuclear power industry that was flourishing in Sweden.

Anyone travelling on the other side of the strait in nearby Denmark during those years had a hard time missing the hundreds of wind power generators that were sprouting up everywhere. Most of them seemed to have the name Vestas on the sides of their nacelles. That was a grassroots private start-up, the result of dozens of small-scale ventures.

Today, Sweden's nuclear program faces an uncertain future. But you can see hundreds of wind turbines sprouting up across the countryside here, too. Most of them seem to have the name Vestas on their nacelles.

The company that built the Maglarp wonder-of-the-world has now been bought by the German company, E.ON. In the last week, E.ON announced that it was moving its northern-European headquarters for land-based wind power, to Malmö, only a short distance from Maglarp. There's a lot to do here.

Foundations for the new offshore wind farm being built by E.ON off Kårehamn, Öland, Sweden (Photo credit here)