Conventional offshore wind turbines are expensive and complicated pieces of machinery – in a large part because of their complex and maintenance-intensive gearboxes. Dr Shahriar Hossain from the University of Wollongong (UOW) in Australia is looking to slash production costs and drastically improve efficiency replacing these gearboxes with a superconducting coil.

Wind turbine gearboxes connect the low-speed shaft, which is turned by the rotation of the blades, to the high-speed shaft that drives the generator, increasing the rotational speed of the low-speed shaft from around 30-60 rpm to the rotational speed required by the generator to produce electricity – which is usually around 1,000-1,800 rpm.

To avoid the cost, maintenance and efficiency-loss problems associated with the use of gear boxes, Dr Hossain, a materials scientist from the UOW's Institute of Superconducting and Electronic Materials with funding by the Australian Research Council in 2013 under the Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) scheme, is developing a magnesium diboride superconducting coil made from magnesium and boron that he says is very cheap and easy to manufacture and would allow wind turbines to operate with no gearbox at all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnesium_diboride