A big offshore wind company is building a fish farm inside a turbine’s foundation

Mingyang Smart Energy, China’s largest private wind turbine maker, is making an offshore wind turbine foundation that features a net cage for fish farming.

The jacket foundation – a lattice-truss fixed wind turbine foundation with four tubular legs connected by diagonal struts – with the fish net cage is going to be installed at the 500 megawatt (MW) Mingyang Qingzhou 4 offshore wind farm off the coast of Yangjiang in the South China Sea later this year. That wind farm will be China’s first wind farm that features both hydrogen production and aquaculture farming.

The fish will be kept in the net cage in the open sea, but they’ll confined, so it makes it easier to feed, observe, and harvest them. Mingyang said in a LinkedIn post that up to 150,000 fish will be raised in 5,000 cubic meters of water in its net cage.

This typhoon-resistant wind turbine/fish farm will be smart: it will have such remote functions as “automated feeding, monitoring, detection, and collection.”

Mingyang says that the fish raised in the turbine’s net cage will be comparable to wild fish and will be less impacted by nearshore marine pollution. 

We’ll be watching to see if this is something that catches on, as it addresses the issue of potential conflict between fisheries and offshore wind farms about space, as fishing is usually forbidden around wind turbines.

What do you think of fish farms on offshore wind turbines? Let us know in the comments below.

Read more: The US has seen 5 years’ worth of clean energy investments in just 9 months – here are the highlights

Photo: Mingyang Smart Energy

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