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Abstract Recent advancements in offshore wind turbine technology have led to a rapid increase in the size of turbines. In the early 1980s, wind turbines had a relatively small power rating of 50 kW with rotor diameters of around 15 meters. This size grew significantly, reaching 18 MW with 260-meter rotor diameters currently under construction. The market is transitioning to even larger turbines, with a power rating expected to achieve 22 MW by 2025. This trend of increasing turbine sizes shows no signs of reaching its limit. However, it is anticipated that the cost curve will break at some point due to material limitations necessary to withstand increasing forces and moments from the environmental loads and exponentially increasing mass of the components. For floating offshore wind turbines specifically, the design complexity increases as these systems comprise of both a turbine and a floating foundation. Innovations in this area include using advanced composite materials for larger components such as blades and towers, high-fidelity numerical models for structural optimization to mitigate excessive dynamic response and employing unconventional solutions such as combined wind and wave energy conversion systems or multirotor wind turbines. Recent developments in wind turbine systems have also seen improvements in control systems and generator design, including direct-drive and multi-generator solutions. To further increase electrical energy production from wind turbines in the future, it is necessary to develop strategies that reduce costs through technological innovation, enhance performance and efficiency, and decrease maintenance, operation, and manufacturing costs. The evolution of wind turbine technology plays a pivotal role in the global wind power generation landscape, and the trend toward larger turbines is a significant aspect of this evolution. The present paper focuses on the theoretical technical limits of floating wind turbine upscaling and determining the optimal turbine size for minimizing energy costs.
Janocha et al. (Sun,) studied this question.