Indian startup develops low-cost wind turbine that can generate 5 kWh each day | Hacker News Reader

Indian startup develops low-cost wind turbine that can generate 5 kWh each day

theusualroutine.com

26 pointshackerkid29 comments

Here's a critique of small wind turbines. Basic problems:

- Unless you're in a fairly windy location, wind turbines are useless. Most places aren't windy enough. Power goes up as the cube of wind speed.

- Tower height is a big deal. You have to go up about 80-100 feet in most places to get good wind. Also, wind turbines on buildings are useless - the building disrupts the airflow too much.

- A small wind turbine is nowhere near as reliable as the average car. So you need to be able to fix something that's 100 feet up. Tilt-up towers are a good thing.

- The turbines themselves aren't that expensive. Here's one for $450 from Wal-Mart.[2] It's nominally rated at 450 watts. It takes 28 MPH wind to get full power. That's not common.

[1] http://www.solacity.com/small-wind-turbine-truth/

[2] https://www.walmart.com/ip/45798215

all going points. Also they kill birds. I read somewhere that the small ones kill more than the big ones - small ones spin faster?

the project seems a little misguided. India is a sunny place. Never been to India during monsoons, but if it is like costa rica, it'll rain in the mornings or at night. don't get too many overcast days.

The number of birds killed by turbines is extremely small (hundreds of thousands [0]) compared to the number of birds killed by cats (hundreds of millions to billions [1, 2]).

[0] http://www.audubon.org/news/will-wind-turbines-ever-be-safe-... [1] https://www.sciencenews.org/article/cats-kill-more-one-billi... [2] (slight counterpoint to 1) http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2013/02/03/170851048/do-we-...

Not to mention cars. I hit 1-3 birds a year in my car. If every car in the US hits one bird a year, that's 300 million birds.

The fact that cats kill birds in no way legitimizes killing of birds by wind turbines no matter the ratio of deaths. The two are unrelated, and one bad thing happening doesn't mean that we should pile on more unnecessary bad things. If anything it's the opposite, we should try not to add to the pile.

It's a big problem only in a few narrow corridors. The California coastal range has a few passes that are both migratory bird routes and good wind turbine sites for smaller turbines. Pacheco Pass is particularly tough, with row after row of older, smaller wind turbines (mostly 65KW) going on for miles. It's like a Veg-O-Matic chopper for migratory birds.

Depends what type of wind turbines they are selling, dollar for dollar, you can produce nearly 5x more power compared to solar with this specific turbine, 5kw worth of generating capacity would cost $3500 in solar panels at wholesale costs[1].

This is one of the major reasons you see wind corridors like Eastern Washington & Oregon, or Texas being covered in wind turbines right now, which inevitably end up powering AWS Oregon & Google's massive datacenter in the Dalles and a few bitcoin mining operations with a ton of very cheap power.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_per_watt

Can someone find another source for this? Because the one up now is hardly what you'd call credible:

http://theusualroutine.com/2016/05/24/russia-orders-us-tell-...

Hmm, yeah it did get a write up here: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation...

Here they seem really hard to be proving themselves as "credible" through association but light on actually proving out the product.

Real-world tests of small wind turbines in Netherlands and the UK

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6954

Interesting article. From 2010 though, so I wonder if prices have changed by now, but still relevant.

Edit: Main takeaway:

> close to the test site stands a (relatively) large wind turbine with a rotor diameter of 18 metres. [...] It can power 42 Dutch households. [...] it delivers almost 20 times as much energy [as the small ones]. This brings the cost down to 4,523 euro per household, which is 8 times more economical than the best performing small wind turbine (and 45 times cheaper than the worst performing small wind turbine).

I am curious to know the cost of maintenance. Industrial sized equipment is subject to severe corrosion [1], I am not sure if the cost is really one time.

[1] http://www.financialexpress.com/archive/corrosion-india-losi...

Smells like BS to me. Lots of marketing boilerplate about having a "green heart" and the importance of clean energy, no hard data or technical details, no discussion of competitors or what their advantage is over other wind companies, the product is "coming soon" but there's no hint of where they'd get the necessary capital and manufacturing equipment.

As a friend once said: "Nobody stops you from making a press release. A 'project' is a series of documents and sometimes people, not always or typically a powerplant..."

Good luck to them but given the intermittent nature of wind, the main problem with wind energy is storage not the turbine. So a turbine like this, which is probably rated at 500 Watts or so, must be coupled with a battery pack like the Tesla's Powerwall. Even then, 2-5 kWh is not significant. The power consumption of a typical refrigerator 1-1.5 kWh/day.

the major question is how would a household pay a cost of an iPhone (around INR 50,000) if they can't afford electricity. I know that I sound cynic but that's the truth in India. Rural areas which lack electricity mainly do so because of lack of enough demand that can pay for the electricity. There are NGOs/Non-profits like 'Barefoot College' providing solar-lanterns which IMO is a better way forward: Empowering people by enabling them in making those lanterns which in turn light their houses up. The cost of lantern is factored in the labor work they do in making them.

Read this article: http://www.financialexpress.com/economy/why-modi-governments... and you'll know why.

The problem is not "lack of enough demand that can pay for electricity". The problem is meeting environmental standards, which incidentally, wasn't a problem at all for most developed countries (there wasn't much awareness about the cost to the environment when US was forging ahead with coal power). Today, the same US asks India to limit using coal for power generation. The only alternative now for India is to either go with Nuclear energy based power grids (which will take longer to setup) or solar/wind (higher initial investment).

No reason we couldn't provide micro-loans or wind turbines in the same way we have done for solar lanterns and such with partners like Barefoot.

Yes that's the model I think can solve the electricity problem in developing/poor countries like India, Africa, etc. Through micro-loans and labor-conversion-to-product/services.

I for one do not believe even 1% in giving subsidies here and there to solve such problems because they are just temporary, gives false-hope and inflate expectations that problems are being solved but in reality they are not.

> a low-cost wind turbine that can generate 3-5 kW hours of electricity every day

I'd say it's for a very narrow definition of "a house":

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=97&t=3

I guess it could work in India, but households in most developed countries spend much more energy:

http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/average-household-electricity...

BTW, much better article here:

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation...

In the context of the article - India - it seems spot on.

Additionally, energy use in western homes has fallen dramatically in recent years. We've gone from 100W bulbs to LEDs and from big vacuum cleaners to small robots and even fridges, freezers and washing machines have been using less and less each generation.

Hopefully electricity use will pick up again slightly as we all start charging our cars at home, and that will be a good thing from the total energy usage and environmental perspective.

PS you edited your post and added all those links and mention of India only after I replied ;)

> PS you edited your post and added all those links and mention of India only after I replied ;)

It was like 5 seconds apart. We probably wrote at the same time ;)

Households in the USA (and Canada) are outliers in home electricity use, using about 40% more than numbers 3 and 4 (Australia and France) and double that of number 5 (Japan) in the list at http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/average-household-electricity... (I think that list is complete for the top 5, but am not sure)

It still isn't enough to power an average world's household. 3,500 kWh/year is about 9.5kWh daily and this turbine can only generate up to 5.

It would only work in India, Nigeria and China, and only if you have good weather conditions. For all the other countries it still isn't what the title says.

"India, Nigeria, and China" is over a third of the world's population, and even in countries with higher _average_ electricity consumption, there will be households where this would be sufficient.

Buy a solar powered fan and point it at the wind turbine. You are now covered for 2 cases. Wood burner for 3. What else?

Modular power from multiple sources is where the gold is.

I Know This Is Off-Topic But Any One Else Hating The Usage Of Capitals In The Title?

Like it or don't, it's standard Title Case.[1]

[1] http://www.dailywritingtips.com/rules-for-capitalization-in-...

Standard? I don't really feel that this blog persuades me that it is a standard. It also adds another style to it, which is even more ridiculous! My mind puts emphasis on words with capitals, reading the title makes me bounce up and down like a carrousel with my "inner dialog".

Yes, standard[1]. I was looking for a direct reference to the AP style guide but didn't find one in a quick search. Here's another reference guide though.[2]

[1] Take a look at the headlines: http://www.nytimes.com/

[2] https://www.bkacontent.com/how-to-correctly-use-apa-style-ti...

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