Crashing Urban Wind Legends

October 01, 2008

   

Downtown. Great venturi winds are at work in the wild downtown canyons, and great updrafts are pushing over the tops of buildings. All the time. But you can't use a wind turbine to get electrical power out of these venturis and updrafts because downtown wind is turbulent, erratic stuff, and turbines like steady, laminar stuff. A comment to a recent post made this point. Too bad, because, Oh, the advantages that would accrue to us if we could draw electricity from those urban updrafts. Consider these:

• Making power where it is used. More power would actually get to the consumer, and not be frittered away as it makes its way through so many miles of power lines.
• Scattering power production like a thousand points of light, decentralized and well dispersed. The economic havoc and disruption caused by hurricanes, black-outs, terrorist attacks and the like would be a little less devestating and disruptive. The fabric of the electrical network would get a little more resilient and self-healing.
• Being able to pay more for urban turbine hardware because you've shed your transmission costs (thus aiding urban wind's ability to compete on cost with traditional power sources).
• To the extent transmission lines need to be built to deliver more power, and to the extent those efforts are log-jammed by government or utility commission decision making processes, you don't care. You don't need more transmission, so you don't care.

Yet we realize none of these benefits because turbines don't work in turbulence.

Wait a minute, Chief. Hold on. Stop the presses. There are wind systems being deployed right now that thrive in turbulence. BroadStar has a horizontal axis turbine that adapts to erratic wind conditions much as a bird's wing does. JC Penney and others are installing BroadStar turbines now. As they do, and if the new turbines prove out, the belief that wind turbines don't work in turbulent environments is quashed. Turbines start showing up in downtowns everywhere.

Envisioning opportunity and finding a way to get to that opportunity trumps remaining captive to what is.

(Oh yeah, and for an operational example, where turbulence and venturi and vibration and the safety of building occupants and performance optimization and a host of other issues were carefully worked out by Denmark wind turbine engineering and technology firm Norwin, please check out the World Trade Center in Bahrain).

Photo: mugley on flickr

Comments

[Bruce Wayne]

"Wait a minute, Chief."

That's pretty funny. But you better watch out, your positivism is like honey to the energy cynic bees. Or maybe you see it as: flypaper to the naysayer flies.

Either way, please keep it up.

[Kristjan Velbri]

If I were to consider putting a wind turbine on a downtown building I would much rather use QuiteRevolution's turbines, which look neat and don't make as much noise as conventional ones do. They are especially designed for urban landscapes (and erratic wind) and they look pretty.

Have a look:
http://quietrevolution.co.uk/qr5.htm#

[Ken Smith]

Yes, there are in fact about 10 manufacturers both domestic and international that have developed turbines that were designed to work specifically in an urban environment. The key, however, is a proper study of micro-climates. Unlike rural areas, an urban micro-climate can be as small as a street corner or city block where the canyon of high rises creates a steady wind. But once we know exactly where to put them, then micro-turbines can deliver the benefits you discuss, and once we have that data it will be time to BUILD BABY BUILD (www.buildbabybuild.com)