Meet the Aerogenerator X. It has been designed by a group of companies including QinetiQ and Arup, has a 10MW rating and a rotor diameter of 270 metres. Moreover, it could be Britain’s answer to the domination of Vestas, Siemens in the offshore wind turbine market.

Somewhat controversially, the turbine uses a vertical axis design. Although this means it can capture wind from every direction, the huge design also requires an effective output control system. To handle this the designers are looking at a number of options such as pitch-able blades.

On paper, the turbine seems like a great idea. It would also be a British turbine targeted at what is the biggest offshore market in the world with 33GW planned for development by 2030. More importantly, the UK is planning to spend around $325 billion on wind (or at least they need to if they not going to run out of electricity in 20 years time).

Yet most of these turbines are likely to be built by foreign companies. If so, they will be ‘safe products’ like Siemens’ 6MW turbine, which uses technology developed on smaller turbines such as the offshore workhorse the SWT-3.6.

The problem is that offshore wind is a risk adverse market. If you are going to put a turbine out in the middle of the North Sea then you are going to go for low maintenance over capacity. A good illustration of this is the debate going on re direct drive and gears in offshore turbines.

You can’t help but wonder why they Aerogenerator X team didn’t go for a horizontal model built on a design from Aerodyn (the strategy works for China). Maybe it's because the British have such a history of inventing things, like html, that they are going for the killer app.

The thing is offshore wind does not want revolution, it wants reliability.