Posted by Brajeshwar 9/13/2025
Many articles and news broadcasts do this, even though a football field size is not standard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_non-coherent_units_of_...
>Shipping them in multiple pieces and reassembling them on-site won’t work because the joints would create weak spots. Junctions would also add too much weight compared with that of blades made from single pieces of polymer, says Doug Arent, executive director at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory Foundation and emeritus NREL researcher.
>“It comes down to the stress engineering of the components,” Arent says. Blades could one day be 3D-printed on-site, which could negate the need for an airplane, but that research is still in early stages, he says. (Lundstrom says 3D-printed blades will never happen, since it would require a large, sophisticated manufacturing facility to be built at every wind farm.)
2) I'm also curious if anyone has done the numbers on how long it takes these large turbines to pay back the energy cost of flying them there? You would have to a) find out how much more energy they make from the same footprint compared to smaller wind turbines, and b) how much more energy it takes to fly them there compared to transporting the smaller ones (and I'd be curious about a smaller plane vs ones that can be transported on the ground).
So like if the extra generation were 1 megawatt with a capacity factor of 30%, you are looking at 7500 hours, less than a year, to yield that much energy.
That's a lot of assumptions, but the delivery flights probably average less fuel than that, and one of the benefits of size is that the capacity factor goes up.
So you’re really only talking small multiples of the flight time, which is minimal compared to the lifetime of a wind turbine.
At that stage just build symmetrical sets of turbines and fly them wings out in pairs mounted to some host fuselage with wing mounts. Also that's how ornithopters got invented.
Overall some serious Cargolifter vibes.
And how do you fly it back?
also you could just drive, lol this thing:
https://mitxela.com/projects/turbine_transport_transformer
the bigger questing is anyway where this could safely land and start, when it's of no need for sea transport to begin with.
Same question remains for that plane. How to do the last miles from the airport. If the route is long enough you can usually find an autobahn and a river wide enough to get 100m blades around.
There seem little use for planes in that size class that doesn't add costs.
"I'm having trouble moving my turbine blade" sounds like a First World problem !
You are probably thinking of the stone named “the Altar stone”. If we are talking about the same it is about 6 tonne, 5m by 1m by 0.5m. We of course don’t know how exactly it was moved but it is probably safe to assume to have been “a big deal”. Like a large group of people working hard for a prolonged time to make it happen kinda project.
In comparision I was thinking how would the same feat look today. The stone would nicely fit on a flatbed truck and a single driver could easily drive it from where it was quaried to Stonehenge in two days. (And they would need two days only because of limits on driver hours. If you have two drivers to swap halfway then it would be much closer to half a day.)
Now obviously it is not a big revealation that we are better at logistics than our neolitic anchestors. But thinking it through put it to me into perspective how much better we are at it. What was once a huge undertaking we made it now mundane and everyday stuff. So mundane in fact that we had to make laws stopping people from doing it too recklesly without taking enough rest! Now imagine what those original stone transporters would think of that. Crazy.