Probably won't stop someone from trying to sell it to people :/.
(For those who didn't have their morning coffee today: the power that this wind turbine would capture would be (fraction of) the one coming from your car's battery. I.e. this would do nothing but increase the drag.)
Wind powered cars are possible and pretty cool. Turbines could use the apparent wind to generate just the same way it’s used by sailboats to go faster than the wind.
I don't actually have a clue about this stuff but I think wind turbines actually won't produce any power when the wind is too strong because they might break or something.
How about recycling it? We won't need another wind turbine if people stop looking for excuses to keep old and less power efficient devices up & running.
Would love someone experienced with wind turbines to chime in.
Generating 2.4A at 5v from "hardly any wind" (8mp/h) would put this in another league to similar consumer options.
Any guesses to their "patent-pending" technology?
> Much more visually pleasing than a traditional wind turbine.
But also much larger. It's an inescapable fact that wind energy is proportional to the area captured. So these would have to be as tall and wide as turbine blades.
Except it would be a massive structure, not just a small thin blade on a pole.
And don't think they could get away with flimsy walls either - the pressure of the wind on this thing is the same as the pressure on a regular turbine.
I suspect this last point will sink this project except perhaps in zones with very light wind that can benefit from it's ability to generate with low wind speed (and low pressure, so a weaker structure).
> How about to retrofit wind turbines? They are tall, strong, and empty inside.
It's still basically piss-stakes: the largest wind turbine right now (14MWe Haliade-X) has 765t sitting on top of a 150m tower, so let's say you keep the 150m tower, rejigger it so it can move a 765t weight up and down the shaft without crumpling, and add your weight (a lead weight 4m in diameter and 5.4m tall), how much energy does that store?
250kWh, 2.5 teslas, or a medium-large electric bus battery.
And it's not like you can add that to a working turbine: the tower was set up for 765t not 1500, and you need space for the crane.
A wind turbine is only profitable if you can physically connect it to someone who needs energy while the wind is blowing. That will get harder as more are built.
The issue is the tumbling cost of regular wind turbines, even offshore. If you have such a field, you would build a turbine, not a kite.
So yes, you could make a profit. But there is an alternative source of technology that makes the same power and has become really profitable in the last 10 years.
I think it'd be more efficient to use a massive flywheel for a wind turbine. That flywheel could then be the battery and each turbine would come with their own.
Honestly as long as it remains human-powered I don't see a lot of value to be gained. Humans just don't generate a lot of raw power.
The quickest way to improve this system would probably be to attach it to a set of wind turbine blades or a waterwheel, but "how to build a very poor wind turbine" is not nearly as catchy as a blog post title.
That was the challenge, I couldn't think of a way to make everyone in the whole world want the product but it seemed like an interesting problem because giant blades spinning just can't be the future of wind energy. The blades take out too many birds and make too much noise. There is a wind energy project maybe 40 miles from me, the installation of the towers and movement of the dirt has caused dust storms for the local residents. A funnel system could be longer and have more support of a wider area, requiring less digging. Big corporations would only switch if they can build it for less and make more money through additional production from each unit so it is unlikely there is big money in developing it, it would have to be a Bill Gates type save the world project and give the designs away for free.
> I imagine a single "blade" would be moved less by the same amount of wind, but there are probably plenty of factors I'm not considering.
Modern wind turbines have a cut in wind speed of maybe 3.5m/s and my guess is that these wind masts don't have a cut-in speed. So in low wind resource regions they may be effective at capturing market share because they can produce electricity with only a slight breeze.
> I imagine scaling these up you have some pretty crazy engineering problems to overcome, like how to deal with the repeated strain at the base.
Modern turbines have plenty of vibrations that the tower and foundation have to deal with. I was in the nacelle of a wind turbine when a surprise small tornado came to town, we were full on rodeo mode with the tower swaying back and forth. That being said on a day to day basis most of the forces are countered with the rotating mass (someone else can explain this better than I) so the turbine doesn't transfer much horizontal load to the foundation.
With the wind mast there would be most horizontal load on the foundation as there is not another blade or two to counteract the motion and thus it would require a larger foundation.
If you want to buy a 4kw turbine you can find one used for under $7k which is much less than this new technology. As better 3 bladed tech comes online there will be a larger second market for used turbines and thus might be a better economic option then buying unproven new wind mast technology. Pairing used or new wind tech to batteries can really benefit the offtaker depending on the marketplace.
(For those who didn't have their morning coffee today: the power that this wind turbine would capture would be (fraction of) the one coming from your car's battery. I.e. this would do nothing but increase the drag.)
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