The turbine is already bolted together, parked partway up its own tower.
Above it, hundreds of feet of empty steel lattice wait.
The hub is meant to finish 984 feet above a worked out brown coal field at Schipkau, in Brandenburg, higher than any wind turbine standing anywhere.
No crane on earth lifts a nacelle that high.
So the tower was built to lift itself.
Why the inner tower does the lifting
Because no available crane can raise the machine housing and generator to 984 feet, the structure was designed in two parts: a fixed outer lattice and an inner structure that slides vertically inside it. For assembly, and later for major maintenance, the inner structure is lowered until an ordinary crane can reach the top. Once the work is finished, it is raised again to full height. The system behaves like a telescoping car antenna, except the moving assembly weighs hundreds of tons.
The nacelle, hub and generator were craned into place at a reachable level roughly 500 feet up, ready to be pushed the rest of the way by a hydraulic lifting system of the kind used in bridge building and heavy logistics. Counting the movable inner tower, the load being raised comes to around 830 US tons.
The lift was scheduled for a recent Sunday and did not happen. Strong winds pushed it back, with the builder saying the tower should reach its final height during the following week. The rotor blades, also delayed by the weather, are still on the ground.
A coal field built for something else entirely
The turbine stands north of Schipkau, wedged between two existing wind farms in the Lusatian lignite country that fed power stations for most of the twentieth century. It needs no new ground because it slots in among machines that are already there.
The argument for the height is simple: the hub sits so far above its neighbors that the rotors do not shadow one another, and the extra altitude reaches air the shorter machines beside it never touch. The developer says winds up there are stronger and steadier, closer to offshore conditions, without offshore construction and maintenance costs. That claim rests on a dedicated measuring tower erected at the site before construction began, set to record high altitude wind data across the full height of the planned mast.
The lattice and the numbers behind it
The mast carries more than 2,000 metric tons of steel, about 2,200 US tons, assembled from roughly 22,000 individual parts across four legs. Instead of a hollow tube, the design borrows from high voltage transmission towers, a form that presents less surface to the wind and uses less steel for comparable stiffness at extreme height.
On the basis of that pre-construction wind data, the developer claims the height lifts energy yield by 40 percent, a figure it describes as roughly twice the electricity from the same rotor diameter at conventional height. The rotor spans 413 feet, ordinary by modern standards, on a machine rated at 3.8 megawatts. Total height including the blade tip reaches 1,198 feet, just under Berlin’s television tower at 1,207 feet, and Germany’s wind energy association currently regards it as the world’s largest.
For comparison, a recently marketed hybrid tower reaches about 919 feet to the blade tip. Conventional turbines have hub heights well below 660 feet.
The steel problem that stopped the clock
Construction stalled over quality problems with steel parts, and above ground work paused through the winter. It resumed after components were checked and partly replaced, which is why a lift once expected earlier in the season is happening now.
Given that the load path from blade to foundation runs through tens of thousands of bolted connections, a joint below specification carries consequences an ordinary turbine never faces. The pause is the visible cost of that arithmetic. The lattice tower Schipkau presents is unlike any commercial mast built before it, which is precisely why the steel had to be right before the lift could proceed.
Foundation work was completed and structural steel began rising after the pit was dug and the foundations poured. One Norwegian wind farm painted one blade black to resolve a small detail with a large consequence; the same patience over marginal decisions shaped every call made here. Crews working on an Arctic turbine 492 feet tall faced a similar logic: the marginal condition nobody else had solved was the whole problem.
What the machine is for and what comes next
The project is promoted as supplying 30 to 33 GWh a year, enough for around 7,500 homes. That number deserves care: a 3.8 megawatt machine running at full output every hour of a year would make about 33 GWh, so the published figure sits at the theoretical ceiling rather than a realistic operating yield. Treat it as a target until metered production exists.
Grid connection is expected toward the end of this year, once the tower is at height and the blades are on. The wider question is whether a state backed prototype like this one persuades operators to retrofit existing wind farms with towers that reach a second layer of wind.
That answer takes years of operating data, not one spectacular afternoon. The lift is still pending; the case for height will be settled by what the meter records afterward. What the lattice already demonstrates is that reaching the strongest winds does not require a crane equal to the job, only a tower willing to lower itself first.
