The China State Shipbuilding Corporation (CSSC) is upping the ante on offshore wind, announcing it's building the largest and most powerful wind turbine ever, making a peak 18 megawatts with an enormous 260-meter (853-ft) diameter on its three-bladed rotor.

It makes sense for a shipbuilding enterprise to get involved with this project; the blades of much smaller turbines are already a huge pain to transport, so building them right next to a dock in a facility designed for making, handling and launching enormous structures into the water eliminates a ton of problems as you attempt to go bigger.

Size is paramount when it comes to wind; the longer your blades, the larger the swept area and the more energy you can harvest from a single pole – and when it comes to offshore wind, the sea-bed foundations carry an outsized cost, so being able to generate more from fewer locations is a big deal.

The previous record-holder, the MingYang Smart Energy MySE 16.0-242 uses 118-m (387-ft) blades to sweep a 46,000-sq-m (495,140-sq-ft) area. CSSC Haizhuang's new H260-18MW turbine increases the blade length by 8.5%, to 128 m (420 ft), bumping up the swept area by 15.2% to 53,000 sq m (570,490 sq ft).