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For almost a decade, Radia, a company based in Boulder, Colo., has been working on developing what would be the world’s largest plane, one that it said would have a dozen times the cargo volume of a Boeing 747.
Radia’s WindRunner aircraft would solve a crucial problem for the wind power industry. Giant wind turbine blades are more efficient, but often can’t be easily shipped across aging roads and bridges.
But the industry is now facing an even bigger problem: President Trump’s antipathy toward wind power. Trump has called the wind sector “garbage,” and right after entering office he issued an executive order aimed at curbing wind power’s expansion. And Trump’s tariffs could also raise costs for the wind industry.
Mark Lundstrom, Radia’s chief executive officer, doesn’t see Trump as that big of a threat to his company. The biggest wind turbines, he said, allow wind projects to generate energy more consistently. This version of wind power, Lundstrom argues, fits with “where the administration wants to go in terms of getting closer to base load with all energy sources.”
As for the tariffs, Lundstrom said he’s looking a lot further into the future than the current political landscape. “I presume that, however the dust settles, the uncertainty in the market will hopefully resolve itself quickly,” he said, “and then we can make plans about what we need to do for a few years hence.”
A potential boost for wind power
Larger wind turbines have a key advantage: They can operate at lower speeds and, as a result, can be deployed in more areas across the country, Lundstrom said. Longer blades can also catch more wind, he said.
“The entire country benefits from cheaper energy,” Lundstrom said. That includes a number of red states that could disproportionately benefit from wind power, he said.
Moving larger wind turbines is so tough that some developers have had to build roads specifically for wind projects. Tunnels are too narrow, bridges are too low and roads can be too tight to make turns when transporting these massive parts, Lundstrom said. To help with this, the WindRunner would have the ability to land on dirt.
And that size problem is also expected to only get worse: Some wind turbine blades today can span around 230 feet, but they’re expected to grow to more than 330 feet in the coming years, according to Radia.
The wind industry faces other issues, too. Developers could be constrained by the availability of construction cranes big enough to build very large turbines, said Stephen Maldonado, a wind energy research analyst at Wood Mackenzie, a research firm.
Bigger turbines could also further incite local opposition to wind energy. “At the end of the day, I think building bigger only works if you’re able to build it at all,” Maldonado said.
What’s downwind
Radia’s goal is for the WindRunner to be rolled out before the end of the decade.
In 2022, a Ukrainian jet named Mriya, which means “the dream” in Ukrainian and which was then the world’s biggest plane, was destroyed during the outset of the country’s war with Russia. The WindRunner, at 356 feet long and 79 feet tall, would be even bigger.
Outside of the wind industry, the company said, the plane could also be used to aid the military or other businesses that could now start thinking truly big.
“There’s an entire other classification of big things that have not yet been invented,” Lundstrom said, “because the engineers of the world, and the product development people of the world, don’t even try to invent bigger things if they know that they can never be transported.”
50 States, 50 Fixes
Maryland protected nearly a third of its land, and it’s reaching for more
The protected land includes a one-acre fish hatchery at Unicorn Lake in eastern Maryland and the sprawling Green Ridge State Forest in the west. It includes shorelines, farms and woods around Naval Air Station Patuxent River, and the Chesapeake Forest Lands, some 75,000 wooded acres that are home to species like bald eagles and the once-endangered Delmarva fox squirrel.
None of it can be developed, and all of it has helped Maryland reach a landmark conservation goal six years ahead of schedule, before any other state that’s joined an effort known as “30 by 30.”
The program is part of a global initiative to protect 30 percent of the Earth’s land and waters by 2030. In 2023, Maryland joined the effort and a year later, Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat, announced that the goal had already been met. Nearly 1.9 million acres of land has been permanently protected from development, and the state has set a new target, to conserve 40 percent of its land by 2040. — Cara Buckley
Read the full article. Read more from our 50 States, 50 Fixes series:
Correction: The Thursday newsletter described incorrectly government support for solar panel producers in four Southeast Asian countries. The panels are being subsidized at effective rates of 34 percent to 652 percent, a calculation that includes the combined impact of dumping and government support, according to the United States government. They are not being discounted at rates of 34 percent to 652 percent.
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