One of the critical issues associated with large-scale blades is weight. According to the square/cubic law, weight grows as the cubic power of blade length while energy extracted increases as the square power. Over the years, the weight growth exponent has been lowered from 3 to 2.3 due to advanced composite materials and design improvements. However, there are still many potential weight-reduction opportunities related to large-scale blade technology development. In fact, a weight reduction in the blade becomes possible not only when using a low-density material such as carbon fibres but also with an innovative design using new lay-ups and new blade geometry, eventually reducing the overall cost of energy.
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