Danish group DONG Energy has announced that the world’s biggest and most powerful wind turbines have begun generating electricity in Liverpool Bay.

The 32 turbines are taller than the Gherkin skyscraper in London, with 262ft-long blades that will generate “enough electricity from a single rotation to power the average British home for 29hr”.

DONG Energy said: “These machines herald the future for offshore wind power: bigger, better and —most importantly — cheaper.”

Benjamin Sykes, the UK manager for DONG Energy, said: “Each of the 195m-tall turbines in the Burbo Bank extension has more than twice the power capacity of those in the neighbouring Burbo Bank wind farm, which was completed a decade ago. That shows you something about the scale-up of the technology.

If you wind the clock back four or five years, this scale of technology was considered very ambitious.

“Now, you can see it in reality, commercially deployed, and it’s very difficult to say where we will ultimately get to.”

Wind turbines have more than doubled in size since DONG Energy built the first phase of Burbo Bank in 2007 with 3.7MW turbines. The rapid increase in size has enabled developers to cut costs almost a decade earlier than Government targets.