Short notes about Wind Turbine

Even some details of the rated size of the turbines would be good! Wind turbine#Turbine size is two paragraphs that contain only two quantitative statements between them, in the first paragraph which states the mass of a turbine is approximately proportional to the cube of its blade-length and wnd power intercepted by the turbine is proportional to the square of its blade-length.
These together would indicate that smaller is better, but the second paragraph then points out labor and maintenance costs increase only gradually with increasing turbine size, which indicates bigger is better. There's then a sweeping statement about size limitations which ignores the (interesting) mathematical relationships in the first paragraph. So are these relationships relevant in practice, or not? We can't really have it both ways!
The Danish Wind Power Association claims to have a Reference Manual and other detailed material, and they do indeed, but the rated output of a typical turbine doesn't seem to be stated anywhere. My first Google searches largely turned up sites selling domestic installations of 10-20kW only, a few at 200kW or so. Adding MW to the search helped!
The GE site offers turbines of 1.5 to 3.6 megawatts, and has news items dated up until 21 September 2005, so I'm guessing that's a fairly current figure. But, it doesn't say whether that is what is generated at the turbine head, or what is delivered to the grid, nor does the 3.6 MW details page or the PDF brochure and data pages to which it links. Perhaps with this particular technology, they are the same? With some large turbines these figures used to differ considerably owing to losses in conversion to DC and back to AC, but I may be out of date here. Andrew 20:06, 8 October 2005 (UTC)