Jennifer Hiller and Brian McGill of The Wall Street Journal report that Radia Inc., a unicorn startup, plans to use rocket science to overcome one of the wind power industry’s biggest hurdles with a giant cargo plane. The plane has a massive 261-foot wingspan and a fuselage volume of 272,000 cubic feet. They write:
An aerospace engineer thinks he knows how to transform renewable energy: by building the world’s largest plane.
Mark Lundstrom, an MIT-trained rocket scientist and Rhodes scholar, has spent more than seven years with an engineering team designing the WindRunner, a gargantuan cargo plane. If completed, it will be the largest plane by length and cargo volume.
The plane’s purpose is to carry wind turbine blades the length of football fields. The blades, among the world’s longest, are currently used only for offshore projects because of transportation limitations onshore. Opening vast swaths of land to the largest turbines could transform wind energy, which has seen a slowdown in new U.S. onshore projects and price turmoil for offshore projects. […]
If building a new airplane sounds extreme, Kelley says other measures to move big blades are impractical. Blimps can’t land in windy conditions. Helicopters are more costly than airplanes, and flying with a dangling blade designed to catch wind would prove complex and dangerous. Skipping the logistics issue altogether and building mobile manufacturing on site would require temporary structures as big as football fields.
The plane would be able to fit one large, offshore-sized blade at a time, or it could carry as many as four shorter blades. Lundstrom also thinks it has other uses for moving large equipment for the military or oil-and-gas industry.
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