Such coordination issues may be solvable in the long term, but past experience has shown that they can sometimes slow down expansion for years if initially neither the plant constructors nor the manufacturers are willing to initiate investments unilaterally.
Also read: Red alert for Germany’s wind industry
The concerns about the long-term expansion goals are even more fundamental. On the one hand, this is due to the mathematical square-cube law, which describes the relationship between the size and the surface area of a body. And roughly speaking: if a body gets bigger, then it also gets heavier – many times over. For wind turbines this means that if a turbine is to grow from a hub height of 150 meters to a size of 300 meters, then the surface area quadruples – and the weight increases eightfold. The turbines become correspondingly more inefficient, so far this effect has only been compensated for by the fact that compared to the construction of several smaller turbines, the effort for the construction of the surrounding infrastructure, i.e. the connection or the foundation, is relatively lower. Above a certain height, however, experts are certain that the increase in size will no longer be worthwhile – and space in the North Sea will be correspondingly scarcer.