Offshore Wind Turbine Technicians to Live on the Turbine?

The Bulgarian architects, Morphocode, have designed an apartment for the future that is actually based on an offshore wind turbine.

Their conceptual design, known as the “Wind Turbine Loft”, is intended to provide technicians and engineers somewhere to live during the week whilst they work on the giant, offshore turbines of the future.

Morphocode, claims that the new wind turbines of the future will be nearly three times the size of a 747 passenger airplane, and require constant maintenance in order to operate at their best, and meriting a full time crew onsite.

Wind Turbine Loft (Morphocode)

Related article: US Wind Sector Booms, Driving Prices Down

Such huge turbines will be popular as well, with giant wind farms preferred due to the lower costs, and the new technology allowing turbines to be installed in ever deeper, and more dangerous, waters. Morphocode has suggested that they will actually create cities in the sea, where everyone lives in a loft in each of the turbines of a wind farm.

The European Union has predicted that offshore wind will be one of the most important energy sources in the future, and that in the EU the offshore market will increase by as much as 100 times the current generation capacity by 2030.

Inside one of the Wind Turbine Lofts. (Morphocode)

The article in Take Apart suggests that it does not take much of an imagination to picture the lofts being used for residential housing, or business real estate, however I am quite sure that the noise from the wind turbine and its blades, would be a bit off putting. Just standing under or near a large turbine, is fairly deafening, but to live next to the giant generator might be a bit too loud.

By. Joao Peixe of Oilprice.com