When a hurricane or a typhoon is closing in, the standard move for almost anything floating at sea is to get out of the way, or shut down and pray. Oil rigs evacuate. Ships run for port. And most offshore wind turbines, if they can, feather their blades and wait the storm out without producing a single watt.<\/p>\n
But off the coast of Guangdong in southern China, a two-headed floating turbine has now done the opposite twice. It sat through two of the most violent storms the South China Sea has thrown at it in the past two years, kept its rotors turning, and according to its builder never stopped feeding power to the grid.<\/p>\n
The machine is called OceanX, built by Zhongshan-based Mingyang Smart Energy<\/a>, China’s largest privately owned wind turbine maker. It is the first floating platform in the world to carry not one but two full-size turbines on a single hull, for a combined 16.6 megawatts.<\/p>\n That makes for a genuinely odd-looking thing: two rotors mounted on a V-shaped tower, the whole assembly bolted to a Y-shaped concrete float and anchored to the seabed at a single point, roughly 70 kilometres (43 miles) offshore in about 45 metres of water. It looks less like a wind turbine and more like something that wandered off a science fiction set. And so far, the storms have not managed to break it.<\/p>\n On paper, Mingyang rates OceanX to keep generating through Category 5 conditions, in winds up to 260 km\/h (161 mph) and waves as high as 30 metres (98 feet). The storms gave it a chance to prove part of that for real. The first real test came in September 2024, when Super Typhoon Yagi tore across the region.<\/p>\n Yagi was a monster by any measure, peaking at around 62 metres per second, which works out to roughly 224 km\/h (139 mph). Mingyang published images of the platform operating through Yagi<\/a> and said it was, in the company’s words, “unfazed by the storm’s fury.”<\/p>\n The actual wind speed at the platform was lower than the storm’s headline peak. Wang Chao, the chief designer on the OceanX line, later told the BBC the turbine saw gusts of up to 133 km\/h during Yagi. Not every machine nearby was so lucky. Recharge reported that Yagi damaged at least six turbines at the Wenchang wind power plant down the coast.<\/p>\n Then came September 2025 and Super Typhoon Ragasa, which was worse. Ragasa was the most powerful typhoon of the 2025 western Pacific season, reaching Category 5 with sustained winds around 270 km\/h out over open water before it weakened on its approach. It forced more than 2.2 million people to evacuate in Guangdong. When it made landfall near Yangjiang, offshore weather stations nearby clocked gusts above 60 m\/s (215 km\/h). OceanX took winds of more than 150 km\/h at its location, Wang told Scientific American<\/a>, and kept running.<\/p>\n Mingyang says all 1,345 of its turbines spread across Guangdong, Hainan and Guangxi came through Ragasa structurally intact. Other operators were not as fortunate: at least five turbines in Yangjiang collapsed during the storm, according to Chinese outlets Red Star News and Cover News.<\/p>\n Strip away the typhoon headlines and the hardware is interesting on its own. Each of the two turbines is a MySE8.3-180, rated at 8.3 MW, with a rotor about 180 metres across (roughly 590 feet). Bolt two of them to one floating foundation and you get 16.6 MW from a single anchored body, which is why Mingyang calls it the largest single-capacity floating platform in the world. The structure stands 219 metres (718 feet) tall and spans 369 metres (1,210 feet) at its widest, and the whole thing displaces about 15,000 tonnes of water.<\/p>\n The two heads are not just there to look intimidating. The rotors are set to counter-rotate, spinning in opposite directions, which Mingyang says channels the airflow between them and lifts power output by 4.29 percent compared with a single turbine sweeping the same area.<\/p>\n The foundation is the other unusual part. Instead of the steel hulls most floating turbines use, OceanX sits on what Mingyang says is the first floating foundation built from ultra-high-performance concrete, with a compressive strength above 115 megapascals, which the company describes as roughly four times stronger than standard concrete.<\/p>\n Then there is the anchoring, which is the part that actually explains the storm survival. The platform is held to the seabed at a single point rather than pinned down at several. That lets the entire 15,000-tonne structure swing around its mooring and turn to face the wind, the way a weather vane does.<\/p>\n “As long as the turbines face the typhoon, the load they take will be the smallest,” Wang told the BBC. Point the machine into the storm instead of letting it hit broadside, and the forces it has to absorb drop sharply. It is a simple idea executed at an absurd scale.<\/p>\n For all that, the output is more modest than the dimensions suggest. OceanX generates around 54 million kWh a year, which Mingyang says is enough for about 30,000 Chinese homes. Run the same number against American electricity use and it comes out closer to 5,150 households, because the average US home draws far more power than the average Chinese one. The machine is enormous. What it actually delivers is solid rather than staggering.<\/p>\n The reason OceanX matters beyond southern China is that Mingyang is treating it as a proof of concept for something much larger. In October 2025, at the China Wind Power exhibition in Beijing, the company unveiled plans for a 50 MW floating turbine, again with the twin-head, V-shaped layout, this time pairing two 25-megawatt units on one tower with rotors stretching 290 metres across. At 50 MW it would more than triple OceanX’s capacity and roughly double the largest floating turbine anyone has built so far.<\/p>\n The pitch is aimed squarely at cost. Chairman and CEO Zhang Chuanwei told reporters the company wants to get the 50 MW machine down to under 1,300 US dollars per kilowatt, against an average he put at about 6,100 dollars in Europe and 3,000 to 4,300 dollars in China.<\/p>\n Mingyang says mass production could begin in Guangdong in 2026, starting at roughly 50 units a year and scaling toward 150 in a later phase. The company is also planning a floating-technology factory in Scotland, near Ardersier Port outside Inverness, that it has valued at up to 1.5 billion pounds.<\/p>\n There is a fair amount of daylight between a slide deck and a 50 MW machine in the water, and Mingyang has not yet explained in any detail how the bigger turbine will handle the typhoons its smaller sibling has been shrugging off. As of early 2026 the 50 MW design is still a concept.<\/p>\n It is also worth saying that not everyone in the industry thinks chasing ever-larger turbines is the right call. Plenty of engineers argue that floating wind needs smaller, standardised, mass-produced machines to get costs down, especially with solar and battery storage getting cheaper every year and undercutting wind on price in a lot of markets.<\/p>\n OceanX is not operating in a vacuum. China has half a dozen companies pushing into large floating wind at once, and the gap between announcements is now measured in weeks. CRRC installed a 20 MW single-rotor floating prototype called Qihang in Shandong in early 2025.<\/p>\n Goldwind followed with its own 16 MW single-rotor floater. And in May 2026, state-owned China Three Gorges installed the Three Gorges Pilot<\/a>, a 16 MW machine on a semi-submersible float off the same stretch of Yangjiang coast, with a single rotor 252 metres across and a blade tip rising more than 270 metres above the water. Where OceanX splits its capacity across two turbines, the Three Gorges Pilot packs it into one enormous rotor, which tells you there is still no consensus on what a winning floating design even looks like.<\/p>\n It is a different picture from the one in the West. Britain recently raised the last turbine on the first phase of Dogger Bank<\/a>, which will eventually be the largest offshore wind farm on the planet, but that is a fixed-bottom project in shallow water, and the full build is still a 2027 story.<\/p>\n The United States, meanwhile, has spent much of the past year and a half trying to make offshore wind go away rather than scale it up. China has even been testing stranger ideas, including a helium airship hauling a cluster of turbines<\/a> thousands of feet into the air. Floating wind is one of the few corners of the energy world where the question is not whether to build, but how big and how fast.<\/p>\n What OceanX has demonstrated is narrow but not trivial. A floating turbine the size of a city block can sit out a super typhoon and keep working, which is the single biggest worry about putting expensive hardware in deep, storm-prone water. That is a real result, and it is why storm-coast operators from Japan to the Philippines are watching closely.<\/p>\n Whether the economics ever catch up to the engineering is the harder question, and a 50 MW version that exists only on paper does not answer it. For now, China has the one machine that has taken two super typhoons head-on and is still spinning. The rest of the world is mostly still arguing about whether to get in the water at all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When a hurricane or a typhoon is closing in, the standard move for almost anything floating at sea is to … <\/p>\nTwo super typhoons in, and it’s still standing<\/h2>\n
The machine itself is a strange piece of engineering<\/h2>\n
Now they want to build one three times bigger<\/h2>\n
The race behind it is getting crowded<\/h2>\n
What it has actually proven<\/h2>\n