A 3.8 MW turbine above a Brandenburg coal field sits on a 984-foot lattice tower, and no crane on earth could reach its hub so engineers built a hydraulic lift to raise the rotor housing from mid-height
Stand at the base of the steel lattice at Schipkau and tilt your head back until your neck aches.
The ironwork keeps going.
Four diagonal legs climb more than 520 feet before the structure even reaches the platform where assembly crews work.
At that altitude, lateral wind forces arrive with a lever arm roughly three times longer than the tallest conventional onshore turbine in Germany experiences today.
Above that platform, the tower continues for another 440 feet to where the rotor housing will ultimately spin.
So how do you get a machine cabinet and its rotor up there when every crane in the world runs out of reach long before the top?
Why a telescope had to replace the crane
The tower is built as two structures in one: a fixed outer lattice and an inner section that travels vertically, carrying the rotor housing and blades. For assembly and later maintenance, the inner structure is lowered so a conventional crane can reach its top, and once the work is complete, a hydraulic system drives it back up to operating height.
Because the lift is built into the tower itself, no external machine does heavy work above the tree line. Engineers assemble the rotor housing at roughly 540 feet, where cranes can still operate, and the hydraulic system then raises the entire load, which weighs 750 metric tons including the movable inner tower, to the 984-foot hub height.
At that altitude, lateral wind forces arrive with a lever arm roughly three times longer than the tallest conventional onshore turbine in Germany experiences today. Every gust at 984 feet loads the structure in ways that standard tube towers were never designed to absorb.
The coal field that set the challenge
Schipkau sits in a former coal region now courting clean energy. The site combines two levels of wind generation with a ground-level solar park, and the landscape is flat and treeless for miles, which means nothing interrupts the wind and nothing helps the builders either.
Wind at 984 feet blows with a steadiness that instruments lower down simply cannot capture. That is why the project team installed, before committing to the design, a 984-foot measurement mast at the site, gathering the most accurate resource data possible at the exact intended hub height.
When completed, the machine will be the second tallest structure in all of Germany, behind only Berlin’s television tower, which stands barely a handful of feet higher. That comparison lands differently once a visitor stands at the base and watches the open ironwork ascend into cloud.
What the numbers actually say
The turbine is a 3.8 MW machine with a rotor diameter of 413 feet, mounted on the 984-foot lattice. Including the rotor, the total planned height reaches 1,198 feet, and even a modest wind speed at hub height produces energy yields that dwarf what the same machine would generate closer to the ground.
The tower contains over 2,000 metric tons of steel and around 22,000 individual parts. Instead of the sealed tube that defines almost every onshore turbine, the structure uses a four-legged steel lattice reminiscent of a high-voltage transmission tower, and that open geometry lets air flow through rather than press against the structure, which matters enormously where wind loads would buckle a conventional tube.
The project team expects an annual yield of 30 to 33 GWh, roughly double the output of conventional turbines of a similar rating nearby. The developer’s founder put it plainly at the site: “We’re achieving the same performance levels as an offshore wind farm, which means double the output compared to standard wind turbines.”
The steel problem that stopped everything
Quality problems with steel components from a subcontractor brought construction to a standstill during winter 2025 and into early 2026. The parts had to be inspected, replacements manufactured and affected pieces exchanged, work that finished by the end of March 2026.
The Lusatian summer that followed brought its own complications. Temperatures above 86 degrees Fahrenheit make high-altitude steel work arduous, and wind conditions at height must be monitored constantly to protect crews from sudden gusts that can close a work window without warning.
The telescopic lifting system reduces long-term costs by eliminating the need for enormous cranes, which are in short supply globally. That same scarcity is why offshore vessels cost hundreds of millions before lifting their first turbine, and why the onshore industry increasingly works to bring the assembly point down to where equipment already exists.
What Schipkau is actually testing
The turbine at Schipkau is intended to prove that high altitude machines can supply power for longer than the current standard of 20 years. Detailed measurements will show whether the elevated wind loads the tower endures accelerate fatigue or leave the structure largely unaffected. The German innovation agency co-funding the project states that if a high-altitude turbine passes that test, lower turbines exposed to smaller loads can reasonably be expected to do the same.
Chinese and Indian delegations have already visited the site, signaling that the question the machine is answering matters well beyond Brandenburg, where both countries face vast onshore areas with thin low-altitude wind but a resource that strengthens dramatically with height. Those delegations arrived before the nacelle had even been lifted, which suggests the answer is already worth traveling for.
The telescopic approach is not without limits. A 3.8 MW output is modest against multi-hundred-megawatt onshore projects now moving through permitting on both sides of the Atlantic, and scaling the hydraulic lift to carry a heavier modern drivetrain has not yet been demonstrated. Even so, if the machine survives its first winter at 984 feet, the old coal belt of Lusatia will have handed wind energy something it has been searching for since turbines outgrew the cranes: a way to keep climbing without waiting for a bigger hook.
Hugo is an engineer with strong technical expertise. Multilingual from an early age, his writing combines technical clarity with a strong interest in science and energy.
