Inspired by the way palm trees move in high winds, a group of researchers at the University of Virginia and Sandia National Laboratory are developing an extremely long wind turbine blade that could make it possible to construct 50-megawatt turbines—far beyond the power of today’s, which tend to produce just two megawatts. The blades, designed under a program funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s ARPA-E program, would be 200 meters long, 2.5 times the length of the longest blades commercially available today. In recent years the wind power industry has moved toward longer and longer blades, driven by simple economies of scale: the larger the diameter of the rotor (the circular area swept by the turbine blades), the more power a single wind tower can produce. If the blades can be made and the tower erected cheaply, the cost of electricity goes down as blades get longer. Even on the wide-open Great Plains, transporting enormous turbine blades by road is a dicey endeavor.