Near Sengenthal, Bavaria, a wind turbine reached a hub height of 653 feet, which makes it the tallest onshore machine ever built from stacked concrete rings instead of steel
A crane idles beside a ridge in southern Germany, its cable still looped around the last of dozens of curved gray segments.
Each piece left a nearby factory floor still warm from casting.
Stacked one on another, they climb past the treeline and keep going.
The gap between a record built for a research headline and a record built to be sold again and again may decide which technology actually reshapes onshore wind.
By the time the rotor turns for the first time, the structure beneath it will outreach every other tower of its kind on land.
So what lets concrete, of all materials, climb higher than steel ever managed?
Why concrete rings can climb higher than steel tubes ever could
Conventional wind towers are rolled steel tubes, shipped in sections that must fit under highway bridges and around tight curves on the way to the site. That size limit caps most steel towers well short of 500 feet, because anything wider or taller becomes impossible to truck on ordinary roads.
The Bavarian solution sidesteps the truck problem entirely. Instead of one wide cylinder, the lower two thirds of the tower is built from narrow, curved concrete segments, cast in three pieces per ring and small enough to travel on a standard flatbed.
Workers stack the rings on site and stress them together with steel tension cables threaded through the concrete, the same principle used to pretension a bridge deck. Only the uppermost section is still conventional steel tube, exactly the part that stays small enough to transport.
The result is a hybrid structure that can keep climbing long after a solid steel tower would have run out of road.
A hill above a factory becomes the test bed
The tower stands at Winnberg, a hill roughly 1,837 feet above sea level next to the company’s own headquarters in Sengenthal, chosen so the firm could watch its own prototype rise outside the office window. The turbine carries a rated capacity of 7.2 MW, and it reaches a total height of 935 feet from the ground to a blade tip pointed straight up.
That is taller than most skyscrapers in Germany, built not from a single pour but from dozens of separate rings craned into place over weeks. Concrete rings were cast at a nearby plant, cured, then trucked to the hill and lifted by a self climbing crane that rises with the tower rather than needing to be rebuilt taller for every stage.
The hub height of 653 feet beats the previous tallest hybrid tower of its kind by roughly 30 feet, according to the manufacturer. Higher up, wind blows faster and steadier, which is the entire reason anyone bothers with the extra concrete at all.
What the height actually buys in electricity
The physical record is one thing; the energy case is another, and this is where the project’s backers made their numbers public. The turbine is expected to generate around 17 to 18 GWh of electricity annually, enough for several thousand average German households, with part of that output feeding the company’s own production site and the rest going to the public grid.
Wind speed generally increases with altitude because friction from the ground, trees, and buildings slows air near the surface. So lifting a turbine’s hub by even 50 feet can measurably raise its output.
That is why the industry has spent two decades pushing hub heights upward across Germany’s wooded, hilly interior, where good wind often sits well above the treeline, a pattern also visible in how turbines across Europe are being rethought to squeeze more life and output from existing sites.
The limits this height runs into
None of this comes free. A taller tower carries more weight, more bending load from gusts, and a foundation that has to resist forces no 300 foot tower ever faced.
Because of local soil conditions, engineers reported that the Winnberg foundation needed a cast in place design with extra ground stabilization, a detail that matters more as towers keep growing. Height also draws scrutiny beyond engineering, since taller turbines are more visible from farther away, and onshore wind projects in Germany have repeatedly run into local objections over sightlines and shadow flicker long before any concrete arrives.
Even so, the manufacturer’s own account called the project a milestone for modular design, one that shows how stacking segments can unlock stronger, steadier wind resources. But a second prototype is already planned for next year specifically to refine the approach rather than assume it is finished, echoing how offshore crews building piles off Suffolk learned to industrialize a record design rather than treat it as one off.
Where the next 50 feet might come from
Germany is not the only country racing upward. A separate turbine nearby in Brandenburg has already pushed past 1,190 feet using a telescoping tower design, though it relies on a far less proven construction method than the stacked rings at Winnberg.
That contrast matters, because one approach has now moved into repeatable serial production while the other remains a singular experiment. The gap between a record built for a research headline and a record built to be sold again and again may decide which technology actually reshapes onshore wind.
Vestas, which supplied the turbine itself and paired it with the Bavarian tower system, said it plans to install the same model at a wind farm in South Australia, the first deployment of this turbine outside Europe. The builder’s own account of the finished project confirms the tower now standing at Winnberg holds the onshore record, a green ridge with one very tall reminder that the next good wind resource might simply be a few hundred feet higher than anyone had bothered to build before.
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.
