Larger turbines must face the inescapable effects of scaling. Turbine power increases with the square of the radius swept by its blades: a turbine with blades twice as long would, theoretically, be four times as powerful. But the expansion of the surface swept by the rotor puts a greater strain on the entire assembly, and because blade mass should (at first glance) increase as a cube of blade length, larger designs should be extraordinarily heavy. In reality, designs using lightweight synthetic materials and balsa can keep the actual exponent to as little as 2.3.
