New Wind Turbines Could Power Japan for 50 Years After a Single Typhoon

Sure there may be the energy in a single typhoon equivalent to Japan's power usage for 50 years, but how do you store that energy? Sharp bursts of energy just aren't as useful as sustained power generation.

This kinda just feels like a clickbait headline.

Looks like The Onion has branched out into goofy wind power stories and gizmodo picked it up.

Wind turbine power combined with solar is an unbeatable combo, but this isn't the real thing.

Vertical axis wind turbines are pretty well studied, if less widely deployed compared to HAWTs. Reading the article it isn't clear to me what they propose that is fundamentally new or different from existing technology. There is brief mention of:

> the speed of the blades can be adjusted to ensure they don’t spin out of control during a storm.

But a VAWT relying on huge torque during a typhoon would still seem to require huge investment into, well, typhoon-proofing. As is always the case with wind power generation, the real issue is energy storage which isn't touched on at all.

The entire article reads like fluff at best and clickbait at worst.