BEPCO-R-KT-0011·A
Offshore Wind Turbine
Three blades on a monopile foundation, turning sea wind into grid power far offshore, where winds run stronger and steadier than anything onshore. The collection's generation piece: where more and more of the modern grid begins.
Offshore by choice
The wind turbine is an easy shape to recognize and a nice one to build, so it was an obvious pick. The main decision was making it offshore instead of onshore. That set a lot of the look: the colors of the foundation and tower, and the little platform at the base where a crew would tie up a boat. Those details are what make it read as something standing out in the water rather than in a field.
Like the rest of the Grid of the Future collection, it came out of the same sprint and the same push to keep the per-unit cost down enough to work as swag. The turbine was the collection's generation piece, the only one that is actually new rather than an old design made small, so it had to be in the set. An earlier version had a much bigger, more detailed ocean around the base, which was exactly the kind of thing the cost wouldn't allow, so I pared the water back to just enough to get the idea across. I would like to build a much larger offshore turbine at some point. And like the H-frame corridor, you can build several of these and end up with a wind farm.
The future, weather permitting
This is the one piece in the collection that actually means what the title says. Where the transformer and the old H-frame are there to show how little changes, the turbine is the change: a kind of generation BEPCO's founders, with their coal and their steam, could not have imagined, planted miles offshore where the wind is steadier than anything on land. The Company's records approach it with the wary optimism of an institution learning a new trade late in life, noting the output, the weather, and the boats required to reach it. Its Instruction Booklet is the longest in the collection and, tellingly, the only one that comes with a tide table.