What Happened?
New research suggests innovative wind technology can offer renewable energy sources in regions with and without strong gusts.
Taller Turbines
The U.S. Department of Energy recently released a report discussing the potential for taller wind turbines to unlock renewable energy opportunities in the Southeast region of the United States and other areas with limited wind gusts. The report explained wind energy production currently accounts for nearly 5 percent of the nation’s generated electricity – and continues to grow. Making better use of modern wind turbine solutions could allow less windy regions optimize wind energy technology.
According to the report, the United States could be generating 10 percent of all electricity from wind power by 2020, and up to 20 percent by 2030. To achieve these endpoints, low wind speed sites will need to invest more heavily in wind-related technology such as taller wind turbines. Development of wind power technology remains weak in low wind speed regions, but new successful technologies suggest greater interest in the areas in the future.
For example, taller wind turbines could be built at 459 feet - compared to 262 feet currently – with blades extending the height to over 700 feet. The taller turbines capture higher velocity winds above the ground to generate more energy. Taller turbines have already been successfully deployed in several European countries such as Germany.
The Windstrument Turbine
Another innovation in wind power technology is the Windstrument, a wind turbine developed for both residential and utility scale projects to generate energy. The technology is designed for optimal scalability, allowing users to add more turbines per pole as power needs increase while limiting construction and costs. The perks of Windstrument technology include:
- Capturing high amounts of potential wind energy per diameter of swept area
- Made of durable materials with lifespans in excess of 25 years
- Self-directing blade design allows energy production in turbulent wind conditions
- Operating at slower RPM with higher load-to-torque conversion for harnessing a broader range of wind velocities
The solution was created to enable affordable wind energy production on an individual scale as well as larger initiatives such as community wind farms.
Gauging Efficacy
In response to a recent question on Quora discussing the Windstrument, Mike Barnard outlined a checklist to measure the quality of any wind energy innovation tool by looking 13 potential red flags. When using the system to evaluate the Windstrument solution, Barnard gave it a score of 10 out of 13 red flags:
This company manages a record 10 out of 13 red flags, beating even the remarkably bad Saphonian Saphon generator. It’s also a dead venture as far as I can tell: the websites are dead or haven’t been updated for 14 months, and the Twitter feed updates stopped three months ago.
First off, though, what is the Windstrument? It’s a helical torque generating wind turbine, basically just a fancy farm water pump, one of those slatted disks familiar from western movies. They make the interesting claim that they can stack tons of these things side by side and around one another with no detrimental flow effects so that it is “easily and infinitely expandable”.
Technology Red Flags
- Do they claim to exceed Betz’ Limit? - Red Flag - “average of 90% increase in captured energy”
- Is it an old technology claiming to be a new technology? - Red Flag -Helical wind turbines have been tried and failed in vertical and horizontal configurations in the past. They are straightforward torque generators with no aerodynamic efficiencies adding impetus, and as such are seriously restricted in generation capability.
- Is their product just a design concept as opposed to at least a working and tested prototype? - Green - They claim to have done wind tunnel tests and show pictures of physical devices.
- Are the only test results from tests that they have performed as opposed to independent, third-party labs, and do they expose the numbers? - Red Flag - no published numbers exist. Claims are solely that, claims. No independent organization testing is asserted.
- Are claimed patents for devices other than the one they are demonstrating? = Green - US Patent US8226369 B2 is actually for the device described in press material. Note that there about a dozen other helical wind turbines patented as well.
- Are they claiming greater efficiency than existing generation technologies based on anything other than an ISO standard full lifecycle accounting that has been independently assessed? - RED FLAG - Yes, they are claiming “that is price competitive with standard energy sources.” however they have no price list and no published LCA. They never got to manufacturing as far as I can tell.
- Are they claiming to integrate storage into their wind generation device without a market niche need? RED FLAG - Yes: “has an internal power storage capability”. Note: this is a red flag for two reasons. It specifically addresses a myth related to utility-scale wind energy related to backup and energy storage is almost alway best done with a separate component as it will be cheaper.
Business Model Red Flags
- Do the principals have backgrounds entirely in fields unrelated to wind energy? RED FLAG - A plastics manufacture, a guy whose only claim to fame in wind energy is this helicoid wind whozit and having spent time on an Americas Cup boat, and a holding company that is now defunct -Unified Energies International
- Are they starting from a product as opposed to a specific and tightly targeted market niche? - RED FLAG - They make claims to be residential, urban, utility-scale, marine, etc. Their ineffective generator is the best choice for everything?
- Are they claiming that their product will replace utility-scale three-blade wind turbines? - RED FLAG - “Windstrument™ was developed for both residential use and utility scale projects”
- Does the product introduce major new liabilities e.g. downwind throw of solid flying wind turbines and cable, or varying flight obstructions? - Green
Marketing Red Flags
- Do they disparage other wind generation technologies to establish their technology’s superiority? - Red Flag - “quiet”, “bird safe”, “power storage”, “shadow flicker”, “safe for humans”, “do not have to build highways or cement/asphalt roads”, “only workable wind power solution for seafaring vessels”
- Do they have a web-site that is just a facade or is missing entirely? - RED FLAG - http://www.unifiedenergies.com website is a dead facade that points to the http://www.windstrument.com website, which hasn’t been updated since 8/7/2012.
Similarly, Ryan Carlyl, BSChE, Engineer at an oil company, also has his doubts with the efficiency of the Windstrument product:
Their website demonstrates either a fundamental misunderstanding of wind energy, or deliberate deception.
The idea of a single 4 ft turbine powering any normal single-family home is absurd. Even operating at the Betz Limit (the maximum possible efficiency for any type of wind turbine), their turbine would require non-stop, year-round 46 mph (14 m/s) wind to generate as much power as they’re claiming.
So... yeah. Yet another turbine design that can’t possibly live up to the hype. There are no “urban” parts of the world that get even close to the wind profile they’d need. Normal city wind profiles would cap the power output at approximately 1/10th of what they’re claiming.
Another issue is that their blade geometry is optimized for low wind speeds (which have minimal energy content) and must waste a lot of surface area in higher wind speeds.
See how the leading edge has an extremely steep pitch and the trailing edge has an extremely shallow pitch? The trailing edge is larger, so it will dominate the rotation speed. Which means that while rotating quickly, the leading edge will catch the wind and work against the trailing edge.
The final problem is that the complaints about HAWTs which their design is intended to fix are essentially imaginary, as Mike Barnard can tell you. Light flicker is a deeply trivial (arguably non-existent) problem. Bird strikes of conventional wind turbines are extremely rare, and much less impactful to the environment than the coal power displaced by wind turbines. The only people who really care much about those things are anti-wind activists... who are just using them as flimsy justification for emotion-driven irrationality.
The superiority of the standard 3-blade HAWT is that a very small amount of material can sweep an extremely large amount of air, by using tip speeds much faster than the air speed. That means you can build enormous turbines with relatively little raw material, and therefore low cost. In comparison, the Windstrument seems to be unscalable due to the choice of materials and blade geometry. There’s no way putting up hundreds of small turbines will be better for the economics OR the environment than one large turbine.