Stories of Innovation: The Gedser Wind Turbine

Karine Lafontaine, Project Manager - Offshore Support & Wind Projects: Wind, one of the four elements, an energy that man has learned to master. Here’s the story of the first wind turbine used to generate electricity.

Welcome to Stories of Innovation, a series of podcasts from TotalEnergies. In each episode, our employees explain how the innovations that have changed the world of energy came to light. Want to find out more? Let's go!

Karine Lafontaine: The first modern, functional wind turbine was built in Gedser, a Danish village that sits on a small outcrop of the island of Falster. Well exposed to the wind! It was built by Johannes Juul in 1957. Juul was an engineer, and he tested several models during the Fifties, before finalizing this design. The Gedser wind turbine consists of a tower, a three-blade rotor and a security system to protect against strong winds. The innovative design marked a fundamental milestone in the development of our current wind turbines. It had power of 200 KW and operated from 1957 to 1967, displaying remarkable reliability throughout its lifetime! But let’s go back a little further and look a little wider. There is nothing new about harnessing the power of the wind: this basic idea has been deployed and reinvented over the centuries, to move boats, grind grain and generate electricity. And at TotalEnergies, too, these innovations go on: our specialists are working on new wind turbines that can produce at least 20 MW. That’s 100 times the Gedser installation!

Thank you for listening to Stories of Innovation. Visit totalenergies.com to discover the origins of other innovations.