Are Shrouded Rooftop Wind Turbines the Future of Energy?
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- čas přidán 13. 05. 2024
- Is This Rooftop Turbine the Future of Energy… or an Old Idea? Secure your privacy with Surfshark! Enter coupon code UNDECIDED for an extra 4 months free at surfshark.deals/undecided A new shrouded wind turbine, the Ventum Dynamics VX175, just hit the market in February. What makes the VX175 so different is the lantern-like structure wrapped around the body: a shroud. Shrouds are anything but a novel idea. Researchers have experimented with amplifying a turbine’s power output by covering the rotor for centuries, like Erasmus Darwin’s turbine. How much of this new rooftop wind turbine is a new idea vs. a rehash of a much older one? And what kind of impact can it have on the future of energy?
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My company is moving locations in the next year - this might be a good fit for the new building (3 stories tall on top of a hill). I'll bring it up to them!
Basically a more stylish and hip variant of the 1500 year old axial wind mills of Nashtifan in northeastern Iran. The ancient Persians knew a thing or two
Stop No one wants surf shark, the 1000th time we’ve had to hear the same stupid sponsor spot . You think we are going to use your link, when we didn’t use the 100 other links in the dozens of other content creators shilling the same sponsor???
@@VAXHeadroomLOL good luck with that. Just want to waste your companies money huh? Ok
Wonder how different rotaries would work in the center of it. I'm sure they tried it and it wasn't cost performative though. Making better use of windy skyline is definitely a good idea if it isn't cost prohibitive.
As a former high-rise window cleaner, spending a lot of time on the side of a tall buildings. I can confirm the intensity of updrafts are so strong that it can prevent us from working a particular side because the winds are too powerful on that side. Although I may not be an engineer, I am the son, nephew, and grandson of engineers. And I think this is a viable and alternative option for energy gathering. Keep up the great work Matt.
Exactly. So why are fancy turbines placed on the roof, when most of the wind energy is up the sides? It would be better surely to hang a conventional (and large) turbine over the top edge. Especially where there's a wind funnel between buildings.
I suspect that nobody did the initial research, to optimise the placement - and subsequent investment.
I may be wrong, of course.
@undecidedmf: FYI
I wonder how much drag rooftop generators will add to the buildings; increasing the issues of windage on the structure?
Those updrafts are no joke. I worked in a tall downtown bank building some years back, near the top floor, and there was one time when I looked out the window and it was literally snowing UP.
@@euansmith3699 it would end up destroying the building. Maybe if the building was designed for this they could make it work but if you just throw it on a roof that is not designed for the extra stress would eventually destroy the building. Even if you engineer this in from the start it would require extra support which would just make this idea not economical.
You know being the son of an engineer isn't a qualification, right?
With all these new cool micro turbine ideas there is always the question of "ok can I buy it for my home and when?", but usually that is not the case, sadly...
Hopefully it will eventually get to a residential stage but it makes sense why they've focused on commercial. Easier to get funding and because these require horizontal roof space, it's not going to be suitable for every residential space
Yeah... it isn't that it doesn't work, it is that it is going to be a 'race to the bottom' low margin product that nobody wants to be in the business of supporting. The business model (in general, not necessarially this particular company) is to soak up as much funding as possible, do some research to justify your existence, and then sell patents or the company out to another entity. It isn't vaporware because it doesn't or can't work... it just needs a large amount of scale and support to be profitable, and these small research companies simply aren't equipped with the funding, logistics, or skill set to do that kind of nation-wide rollout to be cost effective.
It will happen some day with one of these companies getting picked up by some solar company as a sort of add-on feature to provide supplementary power to a solar + battery system... it just needs to be cheap and energy dense enough to justify not simply adding more solar, and reliable enough to get away with using a smaller battery backup.
Well you could run in a few houses or more on it.
@@gemelwalters2942 it's more the fact that homes don't get strong enough winds to be worth it. this turbine in specific is trying to leverage the powerful winds you get from the side of buildings. for homes you are stuck with solar.
Maybe as a leased version, but the problem with residential wind is that it will undoubtedly have maintenance that fixed position solar won’t.
An axiom that came to mind during goes, "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good." If the design is good enough and does what you need it to at a practical cost, it's useful and worth investing in.
except, it's not. it's not cost effective. it's way much cheaper to build regular wind generators. would you like to pay 10x for your electricity bill? the price per kwh doesn't make any sense. if it had a practical cost don't you think investors would be pilling in and you would see such devices everywhere?
@@riskinhos Except that's an idiotic question. Devices are not practical until they are practical. EV's in the 90s were a Sideshow. Now, a $50K EV has a lower total cost of ownership than a $25K gasoline car over it's lifetime.
@@riskinhos Well they are not really competing with the larger ones though? The problem with the larger ones is that you cannot build them close to residential areas and they have significant noise pollution . I would like to see the cost and return of investments on these smaller ones. Are they sufficiently cheap and maintenance free I can totally see a lot of commercial buildings putting up a battery of these. Esp for powering air condition units etc.
conventional large vertical wind turbines are not good at all..
people are getting sick of them!
(not just figuratively - also physically !)
@@laus9953 no they are not. and many are being built. much better than breathing coal
Erasmus was brilliant, he drew the first diagram of the earth with a molten core, he experimented with carriage design, and he did have ideas about evolution. "The Lunar Men" Jenny Uglow
Don't read my name!
I used to live in a tall building in Oslo and additionally, the building was at the top of a small valley. It was very fun to watch out the window in the autumn and winter, because the leaves weren't falling, but rising and the same with snow in the winter, it always snowed upwards, even on windless days. But another benefit I see in this is that it will inherently be more safe for birds and that they can be made much less visually intrusive. But I'm left wondering if this type of thinking should influence city design itself, so that buildings are specifically designed to capture and redirect wind and guide it to where you can harness it.
A while back I found an interesting study performed by the University of Florida concerning the efficiency of the HVAC condenser fan. They showed how shrouding it improved the overall COP of the system.
Do you have a link to that? UoF seems to be doing everything everywhere. I read another HVAC study they did. This was in the 90's. They randomly picked 2 neighborhoods in Gainesville and checked their level of freon. They found that 30% of the systems were low enough on freon to double the cost of running the system.
This design have a few major challenges.
1. Still low output after all these complications.
2. High installation and maintenance costs. Everything at the roof costs more everything works faster need more maintenance. More maintenance at the roof costs more.
3. Pressure difference between the sides of the turbine will increase wear and tear.
It will cost a lot. Some companies will still put them on top of their buildings just for greenwashing.
Seems to be just your opinion, without any proof. The cost to install on a may be somewhat valid but these are small units.
I hope this works out. When it comes to any turbine mounted to a building, it is not just about the dB level of the device itself but the amount of the harmonic vibrations passed onto the frame of the structure it is mounted to, particularly as the turbine ages.
and varying resonant vibrations
and other complex effects
for example, a not well known story I read recently:
one of Europe's largest airport, Frankfurt.
they silently agreed to pay for securing roof tiles in one particular spot, not even that near to their runway.
the roof tiles were regularly knocked off some houses there,
and it was finally proven this was caused by long range vortex forces from the edges of aircraft wings.
(I imagine the airport / airline industries, also the wind power industry might not be interested
in these findings being rubbed under everyone's noses..)
you could put it on some wire rope isolators. good enough for the military
I am following renewable energy developments for over 30 years now. During this time there have been uncountable start-up companies with big claims about rooftop wind turbines. All this companies have disappeared again. And this is for a reason, there are just so many things working against rooftop or building integrated wind turbines:
* The average wind speed near the ground is just very low. It is for a reason that modern wind turbines are so tall: the higher up you go, the higher the wind speeds.
* The winds speeds in the built environment are much more variable than wind over an open field or higher up, and the wind is also more turbulent. This means high mechanical loads on the turbines and power that is more difficult to integrate in a stand alone system or weak grid
* Most buildings are not designed to deal with the mechanical loads exerted by the wind turbines.
So maybe there are some niche applications, but color me sceptical about mass-application.
Far too many of the commentts on this channel are from the gullible or iuninformed. thank you for telling he truth about domestic wind turbines.
My main concern here is that the wind energy that a turbine can extract is proportional to the cube of the air's velocity. That's why conventional turbines are built on tall towers in very windy areas: just a few more m/s gives you huge gains in power. All the turbulence at ground level, which they claim to be taking advantage of, is exactly what makes the wind at ground level so slow, and thus so unsuitable for power generation.
Combining wind with rooftop solar can help with this, so that you use the footprint of the roof more efficiently.
I live in a suburban high wind area. Between our suburban sprawl and the true urban area is an area that is more rural than urban. One of those rural houses decided to put up a small vertical windmill (approx. 3-4 feet diameter) about 20 feet off the ground as an attempt to lessen their electricity bill along with solar panels. An article about it was in the local newspaper, and other people started talking about how well this windmill was doing and if they should get one. I don't remember what happened, but I'm thinking the power company was involved. The city passed an ordinance so no one could have a windmill--except the original homeowner, who still has theirs up.
the power company sabotaging another competitor, how shocking.
Rubbish. I expect this died because wind turbines like this are almost invariably a waste of time.
Aside from the possible design limitations I would guess no one wanted the way the neighborhood would look. Another issue would be safety, both for your neighbor when your tower fell over and the bird population.
@@kellypurdue1990 Truth to say, we wouldn't really need 20 feet tall windmills. Sitting in my courtyard this morning and enduring 30 mph winds while letting the animals have their sunshine time was enough to get me to cut it short and head back inside. I live on the hillside of a valley and the wind just whistles through on a regular basis. The cats can't even stand it with the wind blowing their whiskers all around, but the dogs love the breeze since it's already 85F at 10am.
@@rogerphelps9939 it wasn't a case of one here.
Well done for recognising that it was Erasmus.
The clever parts in the design were the flaps....since it could take slowmoving gusts from any direction and harness them.
flaps would make tremendous noise
My town just built a new water treatment plant; it's broad, and flat all around; when the wind picks up, I bet the roof gets scary to stand on. Perfect place for these turbines! My question is, how will they handle Canadian winters?
Norway having similar winter conditions and the turbines being designed there from what I understand, I'm sure it's taken into account. One could argue we have even higher winds in winter in my specific area, too.
I wish I had the money to invest in testing cost vs practicality vs efficiency, because I doubt anyone in the Canadian government federal, provincial or municipal level would be willing to take the chance.
I think it was an episode of the program, Grand Designs, the homeowner asked the host what he thought of the his wind turbine. The host looked confused and the camera panned around but no wind turbine could be seen. Then the homeowner pointed out the driveway lighting. Two pole lamps and at the top of the poles were small vertical helical wind turbines. There were batteries inside the poles and the wind turbines produced enough power to keep the batteries charged up. But most of the time the lighting was running off the wind turbine.
SWtill a complkete waste of time. Solar panels are far better.
@@rogerphelps9939 I live in a part of the world where the clouds roll in on September 30th and we don't see the sun till April 1st. Yes photovoltaic will still produce some power but not as effeciently. However, during that same time period we have a lot of wind.
@@RandomTorok Do the calculations and then you will undersand he parameters. you are likely tto be disappointed.
@@rogerphelps9939 You're assuming and generalizing a lot. There are a lot of countries where it makes more sense to use wind rather than solar, often because of their latitudes and proximity to the ocean. The further you are from the equator, the less you benefit from solar.
Denmark is a great example. Wind accounts for 53.6% of their total electricity production, solar is 9.3%.
A gent by the name of Robt Murray Smith did a whole YT vid on Darwin turbines and made small one with a 3D printer Vid# 1835. Same concept..
That was actually the video that started us looking into this one.
@@UndecidedMF Great minds think alike😜
We have so miles of highway that could be collecting solar, and wind, too. There is a great deal of air pushed by vehicles on roads in the busiest areas, which could use all the extra power that can be produced.
I recall a German company was looking at micro wind turbines, to do exactly that.
It was nice to figure out how to use waste heat, too.
I think that it isn't so much the air pushed by traffic, as the open space allowing run for wind - along long, straight highways, or motorways, as we'd call them in the UK.
@@richardmccarthy2939
I guess you’ve never had the opportunity to walk along a highway. Yes…vehicles do move the air. But you’re also correct that roads can channel wind, if there is any.
I challenge you to go stand by a road with high speed moving traffic. Or just be a passenger and watch the grass on the side of the road. Or get a pack of pinwheels and set up a camera.
Cheers!
Basically it's cost vs output. If I get more watts for what I pay for it then turbines are the thing. But PVs have been dropping in price over decades and are continuing to do so.
Usually WTs work better when PVs work worse, and vice versa. Also in places like Canada and northern Europe where the wind is very strong and the sun very weak, such techs are more useful.
@@Sagan_StarbornThe way they keep getting cheaper it's more a matter of which you invest in first.
I went to the website and the most important number for wind turbines is missing - the nominal output. And that will probably shockingly low. There is a reason (actually, more than one) that wind turbines are getting bigger and bigger. The power scales with the area of the rotors. And wind is more stable and stronger the higher you go.
Exactly. All of this is meaningless without an endline ("energy output"-wise)
Yes. As usual, Matt is peddling semi scams😁.
At this point, the space is better used for solar panels and batteries. Cheap enough nowadays
Love the presentation of the new technologies. I have powered my home for the past 13 years with a windmill. Its not fancy but it works. Its a windmill from the Bergey Company. There must be about 100 of these in my area(the High Desert of California) on the way to Las Vegas from LA. When you drive up from LA you see dozens of these from the freeway!!
It is a reality that I power my home with wind NOW. MY windmill is at 100 feet. What I am looking for is a way to expand my production for the future.
Lol “new technologies”. Ok
Is this not new? @@jamesbizs
@@100c0c There are some aspects of it which are new, sure - but the use of wind to generate power goes back centuries... We've just got better at it...
People who 'cruise' on sailboats have been powering their boats with wind generators for decades.
One of the big complaints I've always heard about them is that they're very noisy. I never really noticed it but we had one woman complain to the dockmaster about the bugs in the marina. In Florida. She wanted him to, "do something about it right away!"
They certainly were expensive, I can tell you. Of course, the best way to raise your price for anything is to say it's designed for boats. LOL!
How's the noise level on your windmill?
For those who think I'm trying to be funny: No, not the sails moving the boat. Actual wind generators making electricity. It's not the 1800s. These days sailboats have electronic charts, notebook computers, GPS, and, for the very wealthy, internet connections in the middle of the ocean.
Well these days you could buy solar panels and toss them in the dirt and they will make way more energy per $\watt then that Burgie wind turbine ever cost you!
The text capture @12:22 is talking about the economic feasibility of a shroud for reducing a turbine's radar cross section, and goes on to state that it only makes sense if the shroud also improves turbine performance. That's a tangential consideration in the context of that paper's actual subject, and doesn't say that the shroud is not practical at all.
Wind turbine fields are a big problem for radar. The big ones have similar doppler and formation as a fleet of attacking aircraft.
When are we going to see self contained systems of a turbine covered by solar panels; with the panels keeping snow and other environmental hazards off the top of the turbine; and the turbine providing airflow cooling to panels?
Hopefully, you’re not the only one who has had that thought.
@@sherrygadberryturner9527 You get us a patent and I'll start the company! ;)
The problem isn't energy production. It's energy storage, politics, and corporate profit/greed. We are fully capable of producing free energy, but the most effective way is on grid systems. We'll never break through the corporate greed, so we must focus on off grid systems. Affordable storage becomes the center of focus for off grid systems.
The biggest challenge I could see with that would be making sure the panels themselves don’t cause a significant restriction to airflow exiting the top of the turbine, as that will affect efficiency of the turbine itself. that, and making sure the mounting structure can withstand effectively bolting a sail to the top of a fan
I don't care if it is a new or old idea, I care intensely if it WORKS ! Cost , efficiency, practicality, electronic ( inverter integration etc.) simplicity, etc. HOw much power, how low of wind speed , dtc. Thx , great video !
IKR!!
That's where the LCOE comes in. This design can be made, but it costs 10x more than solar panels that can be put on the same roof. Good idea, companies should look into improving it, but not yet practical.
Let's do a natural selection test. How many technologies "for the future" from this channel has made it to production? That's your answer.
@@Moginheden Where are you getting your 10x from? (genuine Q). However, this doesn't have to be an either/or: You can have solar AND wind on the same roof (although you must be mindful of shading the solar panels, obviously) - thus generating energy in sunny AND/OR windy conditions (best of both worlds).
@theelectricmonk3909 the LCOE slide in the video shows some numbers. This is how much it costs to generate electricity using this method, including initial purchance, setup, and maintenance. The LCOE of solar panels and huge monolithic wind turbines in similar reports these days both show about $0.03 (10x cheaper). The owner of the building could put in both this and solar panels.... but they would get more electricity per dollar spent by just putting in more solar panels. Solar panels at the moment are slightly cheaper than natural gas when the sun is shining. But slightly more expensive than gas once you add a battery system to shift when they supply electricity to meet when our demand for electricity needs it. So it's iffy if solar panels will be cheaper than the grid for a building owner, depending on government subsidies, how badly thier local grid gouges them, and when the building uses it's most power. (But it definitely can be worth it for some.) This tech, on the other hand, is significantly more expensive than the grid for a building owner right now. (Still cool and worth looking at. I hope it or a similar tech makes the breakthrough on price solar did a few years ago and becomes viable.)
when i was in 5th grade, i thought to look at wind turbines and come up with an alternative to the standard... now being only in 5th grade, i didn't have the awareness of all the different types of wind turbines.
When i was in college, i thought to look at the issue again, and discovered VAWTS. It is cool to see that so many are continuing to examine the idea of turbines
I would like to see a chart of windspeed to kW. There is no costs so there is no way to work out any repayment. I checked the web site. They are quite big 2.6m by 2.9 meters. Going up to 4 meters. Like all these small devices I'm not sure they are going to be very effective. I'll put this into the "I'll believe it when I see it category"
I kept watching thinking that he'd get around to a KW per dollar estimate. I also kept watching to hear about problems in high wind events. Not sure it was the host's fault, but I didn't hear any information that went to how practical these things are likely to be.
He shows all this nice concepts but never real data. Only claims from the company's. I think I will stop watching this videos.
I think how viable these would be for a home really depend on where you live. Here in Florida it would probably pair very well with solar and a battery back up. I'd have no problems painting one green and putting it up on a giant brown steel pole making it look like a tree in my backyard.
Good idea, but as noted in the video, these are especially suited for taking advantage of up drafts close to the side of large buildings. You might be as well off, with a conventional wind turbine in your situation.
@@garethrobinson2275 my thought would be that this could be pretty effectively dealt with by changing the angle of attack of the inlet ducts to more effectively duct wind blowing horizontally, rather than wind that had already had its direction changed by impact with an object
@BumpHeadRacing Go for it! Will it be more cost-effective than a conventional turbine in tgat location? Unlikely, but you could have fun trying.
El Paso advertisement little girl: "Why not both? ".
huh... always thought it was a Full House reference?
@@CaedenV I wasn't sure so I looked it up. Seems that the meme is indeed from an Old El Paso taco commercial.
Don't read my name!
Fascinating video, it shows that a ton of work went into this one! Thanks to the team as ever for your diligent sleuth work. Having written my MSc thesis on small wind turbines in urban areas at Reading University (UK) in 2008, the topic still intrigues me. Wind power is a great complement to solar PV, addressing the dreaded (and often ideologically pedaled) intermittency argument: "What if the sun ain't shine and the wind ain't blow?" -- you mean no weather at all? doesn't happen on planet earth. Especially, wind power could help us get through the "valley of tears" of the dark winter months, during which solar PV produces precious little. Resilient, robust solutions that are feasible in urban areas have huge potential, even though they may be less efficient than the huge windmills in the landscape. Photosynthesis is typically under 3% conversion efficiency (sunlight to biomass), and yet we could say, it has proven pretty successful.
Let's say many apartments and buildings have these installed and capture a lot of the wind. Then there will be less wind and installing the nth turbine will become less efficient. But I am also concerned that there will be less wind circulation and on summer days it will be hotter in the city because of less wind circulation, meaning you will need more air conditioning, meaning you will need more electricity. It seems like engineers (me included) are concentrating energy for some purpose, but in the process creating more entropy in the end. It is like progress (creating better energy extraction) is vanity.
Seems Darwins design had movable slats that closed in the opposing direction guaranteeing all wind to move upwards.
You can see this in the drawing at 7:47 the right side of the is closed, where the left lets in the air guaranteeing all air that gets inside it has to go up
It was an understandable error in aerodynamics that he thought it necessary to close off the leeward side of the cylinder. However, the Venturi effect actually means that all the incoming air from the windward side being redirected through the duct causes a vacuum that amplifies the pressure inside the duct by drawing air in from all directions including the leeward side.
@@Sagan_Starborn. Awww the “air multiplier effect”… so the main criticism is that the slats robbed energy more than anything else.
I am really rooting for Ventum, and pray they become a force in the industry. First because the rotating swords concern me for environmental reasons regarding the fauna, bats especially. Second because the design for the VX175 is really interesting visually, looking more organic and more natural than the spinning swords. And I do wish in the future, once Ventum becomes a force, that they produce smaller versions of the VX175 for people like you and I.
It would make sense to have a horizontal shaft squirrel cage turbine along the edges of roofs, could be incorporated into the safety wall
"as there was no internet or any search engines when I started working on some of my ideas." What about books and television?
I have 2 attic turbines on my house that tend to run a lot,especially during the 10.5 months of the year when it's warm... I hung an alternator on each with a belt and pulley to turn them... Connected to a battery bank via charge controller keeps my batteries charging basically 24 hours a day during those warmed months... Since I only have 12v appliances,fans,lighting,etc I save a huge amount of juice by not having to run inverters,or converters... Its cheap to do,other than the new pulleys and belts when one uses 2 used single wire alternators,scrap metal to buld the bracketry,and a few bolts and screws... They've been running a couple of years now without any issues other than one belt getting hot due to overtensioning by moi... I also have a high amp alternator mounted to a 3.5 ho pushmower deck ran via the wheel drive pulley belt which cam charge my entire bank in less than an hour and using under .5 gallons of fuel... All built using a scrap mower I got for free and running for literally nothing more than a new air filter and carb cleaning and adjustment,and a used alternator that would've maybe set me back 30 bux at the local junkyard if I didn't have one laying around and a used belt...
I fly FPB drones and the first drones to used ducts had power increases. Over time as they got bigger it created power loss. It is a balance of size. I wonder if a corkscrew or a part corkscrew would catch more wind
Rooftop turbines have a HUGE problem - they couple bearing noise into the structure.
Very few rooftop wind turbines survive long if the building's occupants have any say in the matter
Almost 5 years ago I bought a Chinese 15KW wind turbine, but with an average wind speed of just 3m/s, it only produced 175wp. You need hurricane speeds to get the 20,000 watts of power.
However, behind my house there is a run (small stream) that is about 8 feet wide. Using a funnel is narrowed the stream to just 1,5 feet in width and with the help of my father in law we designed a waterwheel that is powered by the water from the stream pushing the blades of the wheel, this is connected to a CVT transmission with drives the turbine. However this solution is not perfect as the stream only has running water from roughly September till mid April where the water levels are high enough to make the wheel spin. However on average it now produces 2000wp and is a good addition to my solar panels that aren't very efficient in winter. In 2023 we only pulled 163kWh of a total of ~8000kWh from the grid. Last winter we saw only a few inches of snow, but no major snow storms.
I understand that Ventum want to harness those cornering winds, but when those turbines are closed so close to the edge, they have to put more effort in the design. Because even when it could my house all year long, aesthetically it is not much to look at which might hurt adoption rates...
Florida and California have many, many miles of oceanfront hotels that should all have these on their rooftops. I'd bet they could power most of the country if we dotted 2 or 3 of 5 taller hotels along our coasts.
California does not have "many miles" of tall oceanfront hotels. There are some in the major metropolitan areas, but most buildings right on the coast are 1-4 stories, maximum. However, most of our coast has bluffs, which do affect the air currents. But Californians are protective of our coast, and putting these units directly on the bluffs, or even on single story buildings on top of the bluffs, would generate a lot of local opposition. They would also need infrastructure to tie them in with the grid.
@@EXROBOWIDOW 3-4 stories up is all they need.. Part of the reason for going higher is higher wind speeds. The other part is taking them out of peoples eyesight...
So even if they could put up enough of them to power California, don't you think they would jump all over it???
@SteveP-vm1uc On the coast, these turbines would be visible. For many people, they would ruin the aesthetic. Redondo Beach has an old power plant, recently decommissioned. The previous owner planned to renovate and upgrade it to modern standards-- efficient, and not polluting the seawater thermally. But no, it was "ugly," the transmission lines were an "eyesore," and besides, the electricity it generated didn't go to Redondo Beach, I was told by one of its opponents.
I don't think they understand how the grid works.
The big issue with shrouds is that it... well... blocks the wind you are trying to capture.
This puts shrouds into 2 super general categories.
1) block some air mass, but gain additional velocity. So most roof-top wind systems use things like the side of a building to take advantage of a 'natural' (or at least pre-built) shroud to get higher average speeds to allow small turbines to get more output than they would normally.
2) create a long or tall enough shroud to take advantage of a pressure difference. This gives you a sort of chimney/draft effect, which isn't a high speed, but it can be constant even in a no-wind area. While this isn't typically in effect with turbines, it gets used a lot in dry arid climates for passive ventilation.
So will this work? Absolutely! Lots of companies are doing this right now, and it isn't particularly unique other than its exterior visuals (probably the prettiest one Ive seen). The big question is if the extra material for the shroud can keep costs low, if the inherently uneven torque on the turbine from the wind-ward side becomes a maintenance issue compared to 'self directing' turbines that point the whole blade into the wind more evenly, or how much markup a trendy company is going to charge for what is effectively (and I don't mean disrespect) a large fan with a plastic box around it. As long as the markup isn't too awful, I think this (and the many other similar options coming to market) can be pretty awesome.
Super unfortunate about the Darwin design though. That basically means that almost any yahoo out there can copy-paste their design and claim that they got it from centuries old drawings and not copyright infringement. That is going to be a large legal pain to defend, and could make a low profit margin design simply unaffordable.
People either know how to make bricks and concrete blocks, or can figure it out easy enough.
And Home Depot seems to have no trouble selling plenty.
You are missing the idea of air that would have passed under/over/around the turbine is now redirected into the turbine. Sure some air might be blocked by the shroud however some air being blocked and some redirected into the turbine is more than to not having any redirected at all.
"Blocks" is the wrong word. "Redirects" is more accurate.
I am impressed that you still managed to keep this video so concise.
very interesting I can't imagine it would be hard to install these on commercial roofs where there's probably not much going on otherwise.
It looks something like the fan part of a high bypass turbofan engine, but working in reverse
DAWTs must measure at least 1.4 meters in diameter, with a double height of 2.8 meters.
The minimum roof height for maximum efficiency should be 1.4 times the structure height or 2.8*1.4~4 meters.
With such a height of the structure, windage and vibration will be on the stands, since the coefficient corresponds to much higher than most vertical tubrins (and it doesn’t even make sense to compare with horizontal ones).
There are no wavy flaps in the pictures and videos, which means there are large losses on the traverses and tips of the blades, wind concentrates.
The main question is what is the TSR of this turbine? (Tip Speed Ratio - relative blade tip speed to wind speed).
Why did the developers use only one propeller, and not two, rotating in opposite directions?
The wind is already concentrated, which means it makes sense to use simple technologies to increase the efficiency of turbines.
Why aren't the vertical stiffeners angled at 30 or 60 degrees to further twist the wind and increase lift?
What is totally missing are the rentability calculations, costs and expected revenue in comparison with alternative investments in energy generators. Norio's channel does an excellent job in that respect.
If it was affordable, for the home, I'd take 2 or 3! Here in South Africa, Cape Town, we have strong winds, often at night. When we have loadshedding and the battery is running low, this would extend our exiting PV systems by being able to charge off grid at night.
Decentralizing our power supply is the most strategically brilliant move we can make. As we sit now, one dam going "flush" could potentially cripple the West Coast.
I think that encouraging the use and installation of alternate sources of numerous small providers with Grid Following Inverters would help considerably, with Power Companies controlling said Grid. We also need some "Neighborhood Battery Plants" scattered all over to provide precise pinpoint provision of power in areas that would normally have been shut down because no source, but that area's grid is fine.
Yes! I hate the idea of tearing up chunks of the desert to install experimental power generation technologies, plus having to build new transmission lines to send the electricity to the cities. We have plenty of empty roofs awaiting solar panels within the metropolitan areas; we just need better ways of storing the electricity. Backyard wind turbines might be an option as well.
@@EXROBOWIDOW Flow Batteries, and even simpler: Gravity Batteries, and I don't mean rocks and cranes.
There's a class of battery that uses two different solutions that combine into a salt to make electricity, and the specific gravity of each keeps them separated until current is actually drawn out. The salt solutions separate back out when recharged into the original solutions, and the battery can also be recharged almost instantly by simply dumping it out and adding new liquids in the "Charged" state.
Here's a Video that explains it better than I can here. czcams.com/video/c-Ffrfrd6CM/video.html
This was kind of all over the place- jumping from one topic to another while assuring the audience that none of this was relevant.
Pretty... turbulent.
Yeah. Super messy video. Over ten minutes of an 18 minute video spent chasing down a historical red herring. Not your best work Matt…
Appreciate the feedback.
Commercial don't help
@@UndecidedMF The historical info was cool although maybe it wasn't worth covering this topic just yet as the modern era data is woefully lacking. I still watched the video and thought it was fine but I would prefer videos that are less speculation and more concrete here is what it does / costs / outputs and here are the current projects and future greenlit projects. Makes the tech more grounded, I can go to r/futurology and find fanciful revolutionary vaporware all day long.
Honestly, I thought I was going interesting to hear about his process.
Yes, it was a little turbulent, but still interesting .
Looking at the straight upright parts of the duct, I would hazard a guess that angling them in the direction of turn of the turbine would result in further increase of efficiency as the wind is, effectively, rotatiionally spun up before reaching the blades.
I would love to have one or two of these for experimental purposes to see how efficient they are, and with a clutch and multiple motors to make use of differing wind speeds, i.e. if the rpm begins to overrev, add another motor to the array to draw more power, slow the RPM and prevent destruction of the system in high winds, but draw a small amount in low winds.
Kudos for not giving into clickbait. Those turbines should be used to power rooftop HVAC
That picture with the warehouse covered 1/3 in PV and 2/3 wind turbines does look questionable. As in, it's probably more cost effective to cover the whole thing in solar.
Where it seems to get interesting is high buildings with the updraft effect. If this gives you more power and/or more reliable power than PV at a comparable cost.
Yeah... that is my fear with a lot of this too. The plus side is that it can generate power at night when the panels can't... but it is likely going to be cheaper to just tack more and more panels on the roof.
If going totally off-grid, then there is a potential argument that you can get away with a smaller battery backup... but with the prices of batteries continuing to drop over time, this also becomes a really hard sell.
But they do look pretty futuristic and cool looking! Sadly, that just gets you views, not sales. It's not a tesla that you pay too much for to show off at the office, its a utility piece that merely need to 'not look ugly', and in a rooftop world competing with the looks of solar panels and air conditioners it isn't a particularly high bar to pass lol.
It might be more cost effective to cover it in solar, but the energy mix might ensure higher reliability. Since you would have production on cloudy days and at night as well during peak hours, it would reduce the amount of battery capacity you would need. Sure, solar may be more efficient using space, but it's only sunny no more than 50% of the time anywhere on earth.
It would be interesting to see how this tech fairs in northern winters. We get freezing rain several times a year as well as a fair amount of snow.
Just a guess but since the company is Norwegian, I would suspect it handles cold weather pretty well.
Seems like it could be cool. I just see a lot of complications. Birds/animals, wear from weather such as hail, snow/ice, the maintenance necessary, the extra weight on the roof. Likely will need extra engineerig for building construction and retrofitting of reinforcements. Upside is power generation at all hours of the day. Seems more of a specific use case. And as always, the problem of energy storage for use when the wind does not blow.
FYI, the EPA recommends an interior noise level of 45 dBA for "health and safety with a margin of error". However, it is problematic to measure interior noise of private homes for noise studies. The EPA determined that a woodframe structure (typical house construction in the US) with an open window would conservatively attenuate outdoor noise levels by 10 dBA, ergo an acceptable 55 dBA noise level when measured outdoors.
I thought what was interesting was a solar up draft tower years ago. Wonder what ever happened to the idea.
Look up Enviromission - they keep touting the idea but don't seem to have successfully implemented anything. I almost invested in them years ago - glad I didn't!
Worked on a project like that and it did not scale well. As the diameter increased the energy output was not linear. But the cost was so it was shelved. Might work today if you could get the usage of your house low enough.
The same thing that happened to concentrated solar thermal: Photovoltaics got really cheap.
If it had proved to be any good we would all be using it.
And that goes for all the other lizard lotion solutions on You tube.
Technology isn't like the oo-ra adverts you see, Its a hard grind of eliminating 'solutions' that definitely cannot work, and then trying to get the ones that have some chance, to work well enough and cheaply enough to be worth building.
All renewable energy survives on a pinnacle of state subsidy.u. None of it is actually worth building at scale, except hydro.
@@vylbird8014 True, it would be great if batteries could do the same thing,
The fundamental problem with wind turbines in built environments is the wind speed, hence all the efforts to "multiply" the velocity. You can't beat fundamental physics. Wind turbine design is mostly the function of wind speed and the blade swept area. when you building enclosure to increase wind speed, the swept area decreases. Since wind speed is in a 3rd power relationship, there is some credibility about increasing wind speed to sacrifice swept area, but the benefit only really shows over a certain wind speed.... hence... does the site have sufficient wind speed is practically the only question you need to ask. Wind in the urban environment is sporadic and bad for consistent generation. All the CFD simulations are mostly steady-state wind that does not capture the dynamics of changing velocity and inconsistency, and I have not yet found a building top wind generation project generates as much as they claimed prior to installation. The product shown in this video is probably already pushing for the max efficiency of the design, I hope it works well in the real setting. And there is also the generation frequency thing that requires wind turbines to go from AC to DC and then back to AC (to make sure its 60 Hz in the US), probably canceling out all the efficiency in design.
Obviously bigger is better when it comes to pure power generation, but you aren't sacrificing swept area in a limited space environment. You wouldn't be putting massive turbines there anyway. So as long as they produce useful energy at a decent cost it doesn't matter how big they are.
Who cares if the wind is sporadic? Surely no one in their right mind isn't putting a battery in between generation and usage. Besides, the whole point is to offset grid usage, not replace it.
The efficiency and potential of the unit has to be established in ideal conditions. They would be the first people to tell you that your specific building isn't going to be hitting that number.
In the end, the cost of manufacture is the most important number. Matt gave it an offhand mention, but it truly is the make or break metric. It's like the difference in car sizes between America and Europe. America has cheap gas and huge cars, Europe has expensive gas and small cars. If the turbine is cheap its fine if it can only produce 1000 kw/hrs.
@@jackinthebox301 putting even these small turbines on the roof would require extra engineering for the structure. At that point would it even be worth the cost?
ooof... I didn't even thing of the AC to DC part of this... in my mind I was comparing to solar, but this would naturally be an AC device with varying frequency, so you would either need some crazy electronics to fix the AC into something usable, or take the extra conversion losses... rough...
@@pin65371 That's included in what I'm saying. If the cost is low enough then they make sense.
I have greenhouses. There have always been problems with having far too much heat high up in the building where it could not get out. Last year I redesigned one of them with vents in the roof to alleviate this problem it has worked extremely well. The temperature inside the greenhouse is never more than five degrees (F) higher than the outside air. A turbine such as this would work extremely well well over a greenhouse, possibly making it worth adding a greenhouse to a net zero home.
One of the reason for resistance to wind turbines in urban areas is the rotating blades that is distracting. Hiding them inside a shroud should make them more acceptable in an urban setting. Placing them on top of tall buildings means noise should make this less of an issue.
It's estimated that 70 - 80% of people will live in cities by 2050'ish - cities MUST start providing solutions to sustainability issues and become less parasitic on its hinterlands.
I think these devices have their place.
You mentioned the noise for one turbine.
Although the noise might not be greater 55 decibels would multiple turbines create a widespread background noise,?
Especially on top of an apartment building.
Would the noise be bothersome to the inhabitants if there were 10 or 15 of them on the roof?
Are the tenants on the roof with the turbines?
They don't hear the AC units
@@soccerguy2433 I understand that.
Background noise no matter the source can create medical and psychological issues.
Adding another layer of noise without remediation might cause problems with improper installation.
Any time you have multiple turbines it isn't the noise level that causes the greatest annoyance, its that impedance 'wom, wom, wom' sound when 2 are close but not quite in sync with each other. Its a neat effect on the Enterprise... less cool when you have to live with it shaking your structure and hearing it in your bones lol.
What does 40db sound like?
People mention a sound level but without a reference for comparison it's just a number.
@@johnwenzel2003 Somewhere between a typical bird call and a large transformer at 100 ft.
As someone who's worked amongst large downtown office towers all my life and battled the "wind tunnel" effect, I have always watched developments like these with keen interest - there is a _huge_ amount of energy being channeled through and over these canyons of concrete, steel and glass, just waiting to be tapped.
And 100% that the arguments that "well actually you're better off building huge turbines far away" completely miss the mark - because those don't do _anything_ with all that energy that's flowing through _right here._ The question isn't "can something else somewhere else do better?" but "can we take advantage of what's happening _right here_ in a cost-effective way?"
Living in San Francisco, where we're overdue for another shaker on the level of 1906 (and having been through 1989 and knowing how _that_ felt, and being aware that it was a _baby_ quake next to 1906), it's struck me that I want to live in an apartment building that's got its own solar & wind (and whatever other kind imaginable) power generation & a lot of long-term stationary battery storage (liquid flow & the like), set up microgrid-style linked up with the local utility, so that, when everything's going well, we can do the grid-demand-smoothing thing, and when things go awry, we can keep our lights & fridges on and maybe help out the neighborhood until the grid comes back up.
The problem is that putting something on top of a building to catch energy, isn't an energy free thing. All the force the generator catches, is felt by tu building.
Kinda like when you stick your hand out the window of a car at high speed. You feel the energy your hand catches all the way in your shoulder.
The building needs to be built to handle that stress. Decently easy when building new, an expensive nightmare for a preexisting building.
@@lordgarion514 But the building is already taking the full force of the wind (by converting its horizontal motion to vertical); since the wind is already mostly moving upward when it enters the DAWT, any additional side forces will be negligible, it seems to me.
@@theelectricmonk3909
The full force on the building. The building is designed for those forces. It was not designed for the extra force from the wind hitting more stuff added on later.
If you stick both hands out the window, don't you feel twice the force???
@@lordgarion514 If a building is sufficiently marginal that it can't handle the small (compared to the load from its entire face) extra forces from a few accoutrements added to the roof - then it would (at least here in the UK) be considered an unsafe structure & either condemned, or at least evacuated until it was brought up to standards.
It's also worth considering - what are the direction of the additional forces? Given these are on the edge of the building, the predominant force is upwards, with a very small sideways component. i.e. the side load on the building (which is the important one, in the case of wind resistance) will increase negligibly. It's not like we're adding another wall, or a big vertical wind break here.
@@theelectricmonk3909
It's not a small force though.
Your problem is you don't understand the forces involved.
Also,you can push a spike into wood smoothly, and it will take many hundreds of pounds of pressure to drive it in.
But you can also drive a spike into wood with just a few pounds of force hitting it over and over. Wind is unsteady.
I think being able to take advantage of low-level surface wind is one of the best opportunities we have for renewable energy. And if they can really get 3 to 6 thousand kWh per year out of those units, it's not hard to see how blanketing a city with them could have huge impacts for distributed energy generation.
What's nice about this is that it works regardless of the direction of the wind.
3:36 there were books though. Regardless if he was inspired by it or not the Internet is not the only way to ever get information.
I would think that a smaller version would also work on the peak of a residential home. Similar air patterns are seen as air hits a rooftop and moves upward to the peak. A secondary effect happens on sunny days when the air is further heated by the hot shingles.
Smaller in wind turbines means less efficient. A size suitable for a residential house would only produce a few hundreds of kWh at best.
I love the idea of a small windmill or turbine for urban applications, but my biggest question: the amount of noise generated from this and other forms of wind-driven power generation.
We need numbers! Startup single speed, how many watts at different windspeed etc.... Most turbines make zero power below 2 meter per second wind speed, if it can't beat that, it's not much good lol
People can independently reach the same idea. Same as crabs.
I spent some time working on small scale residential sized turbines (
I'm an engineer working in a role where I see investor after investor sinking money into startups that simply should not exist. Basically borderline scams, pushing products that are farcically sub-par and could never compete with even the worst of existing technology, but because they have some novel twist (that doesn't actually make them better in any way) they catch the eye of people with lots of money and no technical savvy.
Unfortunately a lot of these investors can't be told, they just see you as a "naysayer" who will be proven wrong.
This one isn't really that bad compared to a lot of what I have seen.
Watching this channel go full grifter has been yucky.
“Why are people still investing in this nonsense?”
At least three independent reasons.
1) it’s obvious there’s power available in the wind. It requires math and engineering to figure out it’s not worth capturing in most cases. Most people aren’t educated, and so can’t figure that out on their own.
2) the Next Big Thing is almost always something humanity had figured out a long time before but hadn’t come up with an efficient way of doing it - this might be the next big thing (probably not)
3) there’s an application for very small scale power production beyond solar, as an additional redundancy factor on top of solar and battery backup, particularly in areas with risk of solar panel occlusion (due to clouds, snow, etc).
It does not matter if a person knows about an existing patent. But when a person makes something that is too close to an existing valid patent, then it can get difficult...
But grandpa Darwin's patent was filed long ago, so the idea is in the public domain now and anyone could build something based on gradpa Darwin's patent.
But any improvement however can still be the base of a new patent for a new patent holder with a new expiry, date, of course.
I think the decentralizing approach is a good one. It keep the power local, and when you have lots of small generation devices located all over the place, the averaging of the output would make the entire system more reliable.
It looks cool, but I wonder how will they fare in winter? What about heavy snowfall?
Lots of cities don’t have significant snowfall.
It's a Norweigan company. I would suspect it handles snow fine.
3:38 On the other hand, ever european student has heard of Erasmus, as it is a very popular exchange program.
Wrong Erasmus. "The programme is named after the Dutch philosopher, theologian, Renaissance Humanist, monk, and devout Roman Catholic, Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam." However, Erasmus Darwin was probably named after this one
Perhaps sell this as part of a cooling tower you see on massive HVAC air-conditioning / refrigeration systems, make it as wide as the cooling tower outlet and if any stray winds happen to pass by boom your cooling tower is using less energy or perhaps even generating it.
Thank you for a most interesting presentation of shrouded wind turbines. Well done for keeping it honest and not using Darwin's name as click bait (it must have been tempting - even for Grandpa!). It is worth remembering that the power of the wind scales with the cube of the wind velocity (through practical conversion of that power to energy is often closer to the square). So, an installation in Chicago (or Wellington, New Zealand (where I live) may be worthwhile places to deploy these relatively inefficient turbines rather than in the centres of continents e.g. Mid-west USA. FYI both Wellington and Chicago are nicknamed "Windy City", so there's a clue when looking for suitable test sites!
Also, if I may, I strongly recommend using LCOE (Levelized Cost of Energy), over a stated lifetime, when making comparisons, e.g. comparing these novel wind turbines to domestic or industrial rooftop PV installations. LCOE allows comparisons to be made with any time of generator, including nuclear, coal, gas, tidal and (most relevantly) industrial scale PV, on-shore and off-shore wind generation. Well done again for another excellent CZcams post.
I am curious if these could replace some of the spinning vents on rooftops, esp, in the south to use that trapped heat for power?
I cannot say this as fact, only as "to my knowledge". In that frame of mind, the longest and most frequent returning invention that is not dependent directly on earlier inventions so much as on coming up with a new version of an old idea is the water toilet. With independent development in multiple cultures and time periods and mixed success each and every time.
"... threw my team and" me "for a loop." Quodos to your engineering staff. You might consider linking purchase URLs for items discussed.
Interesting but I can imagine a numbers of birds and other animals trying to make homes in these turbines.
I suppose apart from a wire mesh there will need to be some maintenance in those places where the wind is often vacant for sufficiently long periods.
I am unsure how an animal would enjoy living with the noise and moving parts right next to any nest. If the turbine blades were stationary I could imagine critters nesting in it but not while in active operation. Another consideration would be where would the animals actually nest, on the slanted edges of the duct intakes, on top of the near the blades or below the structure?
@@LazyLifeIFreak When I was an electrician, during my college days, we regularly had to help clean out the rooftop fans. There were all sorts of animal nests in them. Maybe they made them when they weren't spinning? Not sure but I cleaned a lot of them. :)
30% of the Video is how is not Darwinian Design 🤔... Milking it is a understatement.
This design surprisingly increases the efficiency of the turbine.
I have tried making a small model
These tubine pods are a good idea; omnidirectional and bird friendly.
If the top ring housed a ring stator with a magnetic ring attached to the blade ends, the output could be significant.
The technology is old, quite common, and all based on the Bernulli principal.
These turbines could be mounted on the ridge of the standard home rooftop or along the edges of flat roof buildings.
This dude constantly battling *"trying not to get another hit piece video made about him"* vs. *"but need clickbait to make money"*
Wait there was a video made about him ?
@@lupusrexstudio7327 lol several. He gets dunked on for overreaching claims about technology. He can't help himself. I don't even know why he calls it "undecided."
@@NicodemusT interesting I never knew that. Thanks
Man been using every sponsor for years.... Like the content but the ad plugs are annoying and sus AF
Getting so tired of these. Why am I point so much for ad free CZcams, if I now have to deal with even more ads than before? I didn’t want to do ad blocking , so I paid for it. Now what?
I hear you on that, but the sponsors make it possible to produce these videos.
Ya know, the US used to be completely covered by independent AC/DC wind generators. Nearly all farms in the 1920s and early 30s were self sufficient, generating themselves what they themselves used. Then along came the Rural Electrification Act and all that went bye bye.
I like this design. I think it would do well in windy home locations.
I live in Arizona and there are very few days that the winds less than 12mph.
Another advantage of uses a shroud is that one could cover it with a screen over the face of it to keep birds form being killed by the wind turbine blades.
love that there is alot of research going on for lower wind speed turbines that will eventually impact residential areas. thank you for sharing, i love seeing the up and coming possibilities
The Aeromine is not actually motionless. It still uses an electric turbine that is housed in the base.
Just a thought… mount the wind unit ON TOP of AC or heat pumps… standing off a foot or two. You’d not only have the wind power that you’d get normally from the surroundings but the air coming out of the heat pumps. Preferably for heat pumps as they are running both at times of hot and cold. And because it appears it utilizes side wind inlets,, Mount the wind unit horizontally or at a 45 degree above the heat pump. A heat pump pushes out a lot of consistent air as anyone knows if they are ever near one when running. Share the patent with me when you pass it along to the wind machine peeps. Scott
That sounds suspiciously like pulling yuorself up by your own bootlaces.
I suspect that adding a device trying to capture the energy from the air being pushed out of the AC unit would simply force that AC unit to work harder to shft the air or shift less air with the same energy going into its fan.
Remember the Laws of Thermodynamics as they apply in mechanics (and life):
1: You cannot win, the best you can do is break even.
2: You can only break even if the ambient temperature is absolute zero.
3: You cannot get to absolute zero.
@@michaelorton6947 I’m not saying putting it so close it fights anything. And once you get it maybe 2 feet away (or whatever the sweet spot is technically) it wouldn’t hurt the output of the AC and would obviously only add to the wind generation on the input side of the turbine. It obviously can’t take away
Great show. I appreciate your team's commitment to accuracy.
I would fear any noise from a rotating or otherwise moving thing out there...
Or even wind noise when the wind gets very compacted with a very high air speed through something... That could also make some noise.
These two things would be my concern if I was a neighbor.
As a potential operator I would be interested in the power that I could get, based on the location and wind speed in that area - and the wind speed if I had an appropriate building that has hopefully some higher wind speed at the edge of the roof top... Or would it be better to install solar panels...
I have no appropriate building with a roof top against the main wind direction, but favorible for solar arrays... They are quiet, just sitting there...
still waiting for my bucket sized thorium reactor to fully power my floating island catamaran with all its needs to survive the coming SHTF in the middle of nowhere
If you get the link for ordering, please post...
A small one mounted on boats, if quiet enough might be a good fit. Plenty of wind and a need for electrical power. Plus the shrouds add a measure of protection.
Matt its amazing how KI generates the German Audio . Its now pretty close to a normal Presentation !
There is so much focus in developments of smaller-scale green tech on whether something can work on single-family homes, and so little discussion about urban apartment and office buildings - even in these comments, people are saying "but what about on my house?" - no, this isn't for the roof of a suburban house, it's for the roof of a _building_ no less than half a dozen floors up and a lot bigger than a house.
He actually gets started on how the tech works at around 10:30.
I like to call this "convergent solutions". Darwin's turbine uses the same operating principal; taking slow horizontal wind, redirecting it upward at a higher speed. This one simply has A LOT of optimization on the same core concept. This new one's a series of annular airfoils with a support structure that doubles as a flow stabilizer/stator I think this could end up being a successful tech, but mostly for windy industrial areas and cities. I imagine their effectiveness drops off significantly once they no longer have a building to funnel the air upwards.
Thank you for providing a detailed source document! 🙌
It would of been nice to mention that Ventum Dynamics has a predecessor model at Skegness Pier. I think this has real potential for the small scale generators.
I think they have their place in residential areas. The cool thing about these designs is that the wind direction is irrelevant. The space between my house and that of my neighbour is like a wind tunnel at times. I have long thought about mounting VAWTs or DAWTs on the side of the house rather than on the rooftop. I think a few smaller ones rather than one big one could do the job of supplying me with enough power to make them worthwhile. There are no windows on the upper floor on that side of the house, so I have the freedom to mount them anywhere in that space.
I have the ability, skills and tools to fabricate my own, so the costs would be lower for me.
A pity that this technology could not have been implemented 50 years ago. We would have been inspired to improve (and maybe perfect) the basic concept which promises so much.