Construction crews lose days to wind all the time. Crane operators won’t fly a load in a stiff breeze, roofers pack it in early, and no one gets a story out of it. But when the thing being built is the tallest wind turbine on Earth, getting shut down by wind for a week is frankly a little funny, and that’s what happened in Schipkau, a town in the old coal country of eastern Germany about 71 miles south of Berlin.
The wind finally let up. On Monday, September 28, a Dresden engineering group called GICON finished pushing a complete 3.8-megawatt turbine, blades and all, up through the inside of a lattice tower until the hub sat 984 feet off the ground and the blade tips reached 1,198 feet. Nothing anyone has ever built to make electricity from wind stands taller, and a crane had nothing to do with the last 400-odd feet of it.
The company now says it’s expecting to connect the machine to the grid by the end of October and switch it on officially in November. So the record is in, and the real test, whether the wind at 984 feet is as good as GICON’s numbers say, starts in a few weeks.
So why can’t a crane just do this?
No one makes a crane that’ll set a nacelle at 984 feet. When a conventional wind turbine goes up, a big mobile crane stacks the tube sections and then swings the nacelle and blades onto the top, and that works because today’s tallest conventional onshore turbines stop around 820 feet in total. Schipkau tops that by well over 300 feet.
The industry has kicked around plenty of ideas for getting hubs higher, and we’ve covered a few of the stranger ones, from wooden modular turbine towers to a bladeless generator that skips the rotor entirely. GICON’s answer is a tower inside a tower.
The outer one is the wide lattice you see in photos, just under 525 feet tall and built like a power pylon that ate its vegetables. A slimmer inner tower hangs inside it, and the turbine got mounted on that one at about 490 feet, where a crane could still do the honors. Then the inner tower rides up through the outer one like a telescope and locks in at full height.
Hydraulic strand jacks do the pushing, the same gear heavy-lift companies use to raise bridge decks. Picture a cylinder gripping a bundle of steel cables and crawling up them a few inches at a stroke, over and over, for most of a day. The moving load comes to 827 tons once you count the inner tower the turbine rides on, and the climb runs at about 30 feet an hour, so you’d barely see it move. It’s slow, and it’ll move pretty much anything you bolt to it.
How the week actually went
GICON had the climb scheduled for Sunday, September 20, and the town kept its community festival on for that day, record or no record. Strong gusts scrubbed the start, and the company’s line all week was “safety comes before speed,” which is the right call when 827 tons are hanging on cables a few hundred feet up.
By the following Sunday the inner tower had reached about 820 feet and the whole structure measured 1,033 feet, according to dpa reports relayed by the German clean-energy outlet Cleanthinking. The final stretch ran on Monday, and GICON announced the full height that evening. Jochen Großmann, the company’s founder and chairman, called 1,198 feet “an overwhelming moment for our entire team.”
What I can’t find is a clean number for how long the jacks were actually running, because the week was a stop-and-go affair and GICON hasn’t published a log. Ingenieur.de, the German engineering association’s trade outlet, puts the planned ride at about 24 hours at 30 feet an hour, and the known heights work out to roughly 430 to 460 feet of travel. That’s the design. The weather turned it into a week.
Why build a wind turbine this tall at all?
Because the wind up there is better. Air near the ground gets chopped up by trees, buildings and terrain, while a few hundred feet higher it blows harder and steadier. A turbine sitting in steady wind spends more hours of the year producing at full power instead of idling through lulls.
GICON didn’t guess at that. The company ran a 984-foot measurement mast at the site and logged the wind for a year before committing to the tower, and its numbers say the air at that height carries about 40 percent more energy, which it says works out to roughly double the electricity from the same rotor. Those are GICON’s own measurements, and Ingenieur.de notes there’s no independent data behind them yet. The machine gets to prove them once it’s spinning.
The turbine getting this record perch is honestly modest hardware, a 3.8-megawatt Vensys unit with a 413-foot rotor that GICON rates for at least about 18 gigawatt-hours a year. I suspect the modesty is deliberate. The tower’s the experiment here. It stands in the middle of an existing wind farm because GICON’s pitch is a second story of wind power over land that’s already producing, and the company says the production version would carry a turbine of more than 7 megawatts and could be repeated up to 4,000 times across Germany. The federal innovation agency SPRIND has bankrolled the project since 2020, lately through a subsidiary called beventum, on a budget German press has put at $23 million to $35 million.
Does the math work? Not yet, and GICON’s own backers say so. Christoph Winkler of the Jülich research center told Cleanthinking the pilot’s cost per unit of capacity is nearly four times that of a normal new turbine, and that a production run with a bigger turbine could cut the tower cost per kilowatt by a third or more. A first-of-a-kind machine being expensive is pretty much the definition of a first-of-a-kind machine.
The structure itself holds more than 2,200 tons of steel in some 22,000 parts, held together by about 80,000 high-strength bolts, and German outlet t-online reports that every bolt field carries a QR code so installers scan it and torque it to spec. The build wasn’t smooth. GICON broke ground two Septembers ago, lost the winter after its own quality control flagged faulty steel parts from a subcontractor, and restarted work on March 2, per the company. The steel shell was finished in mid-July.
The record’s already got a trophy. On October 16 GICON announced the tower had won the German Sustainability Award for 2027 in the products category, with the ceremony set for December 3 in Düsseldorf. Großmann says a grid connection by the end of October is possible, and the official switch-on is planned for November, when Germany’s second-tallest structure, a wind turbine standing on the spoil pile of an old coal strip mine, starts sending power to the grid.
@gertscheepers ROOKIE1 month ago
