Planted on Lusatia’s old coalfields, a 1,197-foot turbine in Schipkau became the world’s tallest, its hub riding winds that blow twice as hard as those at any standing tower

On a flat, scarred plain southeast of Berlin, workers stood back and looked straight up for a very long time.

What rose above them was no ordinary turbine.

A lattice of steel columns in Schipkau, Brandenburg, had telescoped to its final height: 1,197 feet above the same Lusatia coalfields that once fed some of Europe’s most polluting power stations.

A measurement mast at the site collected data for a full year before construction began, confirming that winds blow stronger and more reliably at greater altitudes.

The hub now sits 984 feet off the ground, roughly the altitude at which a commercial jet begins its final descent.

What does wind feel like up there, and what does it do to everything engineers thought they knew about turbine economics?

Why altitude rewrites the physics of a wind turbine

Wind speed rises with height, and the relationship is not linear: a modest climb in elevation delivers a disproportionate gain in power, because the energy in moving air scales with the cube of its velocity. Double the wind speed and you get eight times the energy. The Schipkau machine’s hub sits well above the atmospheric boundary layer that roughens and slows surface winds, where flow becomes steadier and considerably stronger.

Conventional onshore towers stand between roughly 490 and 820 feet tall, keeping their rotors firmly inside that turbulent layer. The developer argues that by harnessing upper atmosphere winds, the Schipkau turbine can achieve twice the energy yield of a conventional turbine with the same rotor diameter. A measurement mast at the site collected data for a full year before construction began, confirming that winds blow stronger and more reliably at greater altitudes.

So the Schipkau machine is less a bigger turbine than a bet on a different layer of the atmosphere entirely.

The tower that became its own crane

The structure consists of a 984-foot lattice tower carrying a 3.8 MW turbine with a rotor diameter of 413 feet. Getting the inner section to full height without an external crane tall enough to reach it required a solution that sounds almost paradoxical: the turbine was used as its own crane, with the foundation and lower lattice mast acting as outer scaffolding.

The top of the tower was raised from within that lattice using a telescoping inner section, then secured once the target height was reached. It is the same principle as raising a ship’s mast from its own deck, scaled to a structure that now ranks as Germany’s second tallest building. Only Berlin’s television tower, at 1,207 feet, stands higher on German soil.

A coalfield, an inventor and a decade of doubt

Lusatia spent generations feeding Germany’s appetite for lignite, the softest and most carbon heavy form of coal. The landscape around Schipkau still carries the geometry of open cast mining: wide flat benches, reshaped ridgelines, a grid of roads built for excavators rather than people.

The engineering firm that built the turbine is headquartered in Dresden and constructed it on behalf of Germany’s federal agency for breakthrough innovation, working from a concept developed by an East German engineer who died in 2023. That engineer had designed huge lignite excavators and invented a special slewing ring bearing for the rotating sphere atop the Berlin television tower, and his idea for a high altitude wind tower lay dormant until the innovation agency validated it.

Construction began in the northern autumn of 2024, and the final telescoping took place on September 29 of this year. “365 meters, this is an overwhelming moment for our entire team,” said the founder and chief executive of the engineering firm. “What was long a challenging idea now stands as a globally unique facility in Schipkau.” That the man who imagined it spent his career designing machines that dug up the coal this tower is now meant to replace gives the site an odd, circular dignity.

What 984 feet of hub height costs in practice

Height solves one problem and creates several others. A lattice tower this tall carries far more steel than a tubular one, and its surface area in high wind is enormous. Fatigue loading on the connections between the inner and outer sections during decades of oscillation is an engineering challenge with no large scale precedent.

Maintenance at 984 feet requires a lift system built into the structure itself, and any component swap at rotor level becomes a logistical exercise with no nearby road equipment tall enough to assist. Wake effects at this altitude are less studied, and placing several such towers inside an existing wind farm demands new modeling of how one high altitude rotor disturbs the air flowing toward neighbors below.

Like the floating turbines off Portugal that have recorded 270 species in the water column beneath them, this machine sits in an environment its designers had to invent the tools to understand.

What comes next, and what the number still has to prove

Official commissioning is planned for November, with the engineering firm already in discussions with interested stakeholders to scale the system and begin series production. The pilot turbine’s nominal capacity of 3.8 MW is modest by modern offshore standards, but the developer has confirmed that future versions are planned to exceed 7 MW once the prototype survives a winter at 984 feet and returns real data on fatigue, yield and access cost.

The developers envision adding these taller turbines as a second tier, with rotors operating above those of conventional turbines already in place. Their assessment suggests Germany’s existing wind farms could potentially accommodate up to 4,000 such installations, adding generation without developing new land, though that figure is an internal estimate and not a construction pipeline.

The comparison worth watching is not against an offshore giant but against the turbines already standing in the same field. Similar logic drove the 19 foundations sunk into a spent Pennsylvania coalfield, where a 114 MW wind farm runs on the old mine’s transmission lines. Lusatia is running the same experiment at a different altitude, and the data will settle the argument by spring.