Posted on December 6, 2021
In an old NASA building in New Orleans East, James Martin gently pats the side of an immense wind turbine blade that’s seen better days.
“This type of blade was the workhorse of the early 2000s,” he said of the scratched and mottled mass of fiberglass stretching half the length of a football field. Less than 20 years old, the blade is already a relic. “The blades we’re designing today are 2.5 times larger than this baby.”
Many of the recent technological strides that have allowed wind turbines to grow rapidly in size and efficiency have come out of this cavernous building in the Michoud Assembly Facility, a sprawling complex that built Saturn rockets and now has tenant innovators such as Martin’s company, LM Wind Power.
LM’s New Orleans facility is the only wind engineering technology center in the U.S. It has designed and tested blades bound for wind farms off the coasts of China, the United Kingdom, Massachusetts, New York. The list goes on…
“But nothing in Louisiana,” Martin said. “We’ve spent the past 10 years exporting ideas. We’d like to spend the next 10 years putting them in the Gulf.”
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