Rooftop wind energy innovation claims 50% more energy than solar at same cost
pv-magazine.com
pv-magazine.com
I've been a supporter of wind energy for 30 years and it's my favorite generation source. I want to believe the claims of this company, but the above quote is activating my spidey senses. Conventional wind turbines are not a serious threat to birds. According to Homebrew Wind Power by Dan Bartmann and Dan Fink, here are the causes of bird fatalities per 10000 fatalities (page 28):
5500 Buildings / Windows
1000 Cats
1000 Other
800 Power Lines
700 Vehicles
700 Pesticides
250 Communication Towers
<1 Wind Turbines
Any wind turbine company will know this. For one to spread this lie makes me doubt their other claims. I hope they're right about price per watt but I have serious doubts.
That said, I would LOVE to have affordable grid-tied residential wind to complement my rooftop solar. It's not an easy problem to solve.
Estimated Teslas battery cost by the delta between the normal model and the performance model with bigger battery :)
Also, I have a 9kw solar setup and simply can’t add more without sacrificing land or basically tearing my house down to make a new, more optimal roof, at which point all the environmental pros of using solar are more than wiped out by the construction carbon footprint. Old homes really are terrible oftentimes for solar installations, sadly.
Look at CO2 footprint of pets and your toenails will curl.
E.g. https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/the-truth-about-cats-and-...
That also means if more then 1 in 50 people decide to have a pet instead of another child it's a good trade.
[1] https://klima.com/blog/how-to-cut-your-pet-carbon-footprint-...
[2] https://www.nature.org/en-us/get-involved/how-to-help/carbon....
If cats are in fact half as dangerous to birds as estimated, then the danger is still of the same order of magnitude as that from power lines, vehicles, and pesticides. If they are twice as dangerous as estimated, then the danger is still not far off from those other things in terms of order of magnitude.
Ultimately, these things are all factors to keep in mind in terms of how we can prioritize actions that benefit the bird population.
TL;DR: focus on orders of magnitude here, don't get fixated on exact numbers.
Is there any way to work out how many kWh such a system would tend to generate for a given latitude throughout the year? If I wanted to charge a 10kWh battery once a day for 12 months what kWp system would I need. What would it produce in June vs December etc.
The main issues are cloudy days, and angle of the sun. Do you still want to fully charge that battery on cloudy days? If not, then you need to size the battery based on how many cloudy days in a row you can tolerate before needing to cut back on energy use.
The angle of the sun affects the number of hours of sunlight in the day, as well as the angle of incidence to the panel (and you can adjust the panel angle). The default is to angle your panels equal to your latitude. If you angle them more horizontal, you will have more summer generation. If you angle them more vertical, you will have more winter generation. Which is your design constraint - heating or air conditioning loads? You can also use adjustable mounts that can be changed over the year. When I ran this for myself, adjusting the panels a few times a year would only net me a negligible amount of additional generation.
There's so much we take for granted with the grid abstraction. Net metering was a huge subsidy to drive adoption of solar, but ultimately if you want a truly independent setup you need to think like an off gridder. The hard truth is that you're probably better off designing for the 95% or whatever common case, and falling back to a gas generator for the few times conditions are worse.
Of course, many other factors are probably involved in any kind of practical estimation. Densities of turbines and wind farms are probably important. There's also the aspect of birds learning to avoid these turbines over time, and the question of whether we can/would do something to make these turbines easier for birds to avoid. For the latter, we have a lot of creative solutions recently - https://www.rechargenews.com/wind/wind-farm-eagle-deaths-cut..., https://vortexbladeless.com/technology/, https://tethys.pnnl.gov/sites/default/files/publications/May....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power: “In 2021, wind supplied over 1800 TWh of electricity, which was over 6% of world electricity and about 2% of world energy”
That bird is not just a statistic, it was the single bird of one particular species in our country, and it flew into one of the few wind turbines we have.
I'm 100% for wind turbines, I think it's a magnificent sight every time I cross the afsluitdijk seeing them rise from the mists providing us with clean future proof energy. But the sort of stupidity that drives an engineer to say only 1 in 10000 bird deaths is due to wind turbines, without asking why or how or what bird is going to be the end of us all one day.
Apparently this is a real place, not a slamming keyboard word.
For example let’s say windmills kill 100,000 birds a year and let’s say that is 0.1% of all birds. That looks acceptable. Well 90,000 of those might be seagulls and represent perhaps 1% of seagulls and 9,000 might be eagles representing perhaps 50% of all eagles.
I pulled these numbers out of a hat but all that to say we shouldn’t lump rare birds together with abundant ones.
Not that the raw statistic is meaningful either (how many turbines were in the sample region?)
Yes, this is a real story. https://4vultures.org/blog/necropsy-results-shed-light-on-th...
> With certain bird populations like the Bearded Vulture growing, birds can disperse in unusual habitats, and it is critical to find solutions to mitigate such threats. Operators need to develop shut down on demand processes and be willing to cooperate with conservationists to avoid accidents and help save birds. Furthermore, wind farms should implement mitigation measures to help prevent collisions such as equipping deterrent devices and even painting a single wind turbine blade black as a recent study suggests, however, more research is necessary to determine the effectiveness of this anti-collision measure. To safeguard biodiversity, conservationist should work alongside the energy sector to find solutions and prevent such accidents.
There are systems that do this. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffkart/2018/06/07/system-can-...
> Now comes research in the journal Biological Conservation on an automated system that scans the skies and can turn off a windmill if a bald or golden eagle is headed toward a deadly collision. Researchers from The Peregrine Fund, Western EcoSystems Technology and American Wind Wildlife Institute used human observers and photographs to see how well the camera-based monitoring system called IdentiFlight could detect, classify and track birds.
> The IdentiFlight system detected 96% of birds detected by observers and 562% more birds than observers. It's not perfect; the system misclassified nine of 149 eagles, for a false negative rate of 6%., with a false positive rate of 28% for misclassifying 278 of 1,013 eagles. Birds were classified as eagles by the system at a median distance of 793 meters (about a half a mile), and detected and classified in less than half a second.
The paper is at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000632071...
Also, my other limited understanding is you have to be at least 50 feet above the rooftop, any lower and wind is too turbulent.
The only truly bladeless wind tech I've seen is this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7Q92fX2P5A
And they are still not commercial AFAIK.
> An Aeromine system typically consists of 20 to 40 units installed on the edge of a building facing the predominant wind direction
I'd like to know how well it performs in variable wind directions vs variable sun directions for solar. Obviously location dependent but I'm guessing the figures quoted are best case scenarios.
At first sight, given the quantity of material used in the device for the foils and central body, relative to the small turbine size, it's hard to intuitively picture how or why it can be more efficient than a regular wind turbine built using the same amount of material which could, therefore, have much larger blades.
Edit: in fact the inventor of the device, Carsten Hein Westergaard, previously published results from a prototype https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/2265/4/... in which he claims the prototype achieved an efficiency of 42% of Betz limit, which is inferior to standard utility-scale turbines (Wikipedia claims 75-85% but I haven't checked sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betz%27s_law#Betz's_law_and_co... ) so that seems to confirm my intuition.
That isn't surprising at all; wind generation scales very very well with larger size. If it actually achieved 42% at that size, it would still be a major innovation.
But that's also a strong claim that requires very strong evidence. The reasons for inefficiency at smaller scales are fundamental: higher drag to lift. Essentially what they're doing is using the existing building as part of the device to direct wind. This is not a new idea, and in favorable conditions you can get some impressive numbers. But in real life..
https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/storage/small-wind-turb...
But isn't this supposed to be a rooftop wind turbine? I'm curious how it compares to other small turbines that I could conceivably put on my own property.
I'm honestly not sure if that holds up properly, like from a true physics point of view. But it kind of makes sense from intuition. It would seem you'd get quite a fast moving turbine blade with this configuration.
It really seems like a reverse Dyson bladeless fan.
If I'm not mistaken, a conventional turbine can turn to face the wind but these can't. That could significantly impact actual performance.
'Bladeless' airplane turbine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPZI6XoHi10
But yeah, I'm leaning with the other comments in this thread that these guys sound too shifty in the way they're promoting this, and it makes me suspicious of the utility of the product.
Thrust efficiency from ducting is real [1].
I have little doubt that it can produce impressive figures in very specific conditions - many designs do - but I doubt they see vastly improved real-world performance.
This CAN produce 50% more energy than solar, but under what conditions? It seems like they should have a side-by-side chart of a solar and a wind setup that costs the same and show how much energy each one produced over the course of a year. Since nothing like that was in the article, I remain skeptical.
Power from a wind turbine varies as the square of wind speed and the cube of diameter. Some places in the world have a lot more wind than others in general, someone once said that if the wind is a persistent annoyance where you live then a wind turbine is a good fit. Without specifying the conditions under which this is the case then its pointless.
Windy ones?
Seems as long as it could be a plug and play solution, it would be a great compliment to solar. Typically days with lower solar gain are more blowy.
I would even expect an example where 50% more energy was actually achieved to be set up in one of those areas. Since no example was given, it makes you wonder how extreme the conditions have to be for this new technology to make sense.
Nothing extreme at all, yet this would also be a great solution for me since I won't cut down the trees that drew me to the place to being with. Whether or not this is the specific tech, I'd love to get some small scale wind generation since a couple of KW worth of solar panels would be a waste of money for me.
The bigger issue is a several day stretch of no solar where your batteries can't support. This would basically solve that allowing homes to effectively built to be off grid to begin with.
Compared to a traditional turbine this design could eliminate shadow flicker, reduce structural loading on the roof, have different safety margins, increase the number of generators that can be placed and reduce visual impact. And they may have found a way to do that whilst maintaining a relatively large swept area. That is key as power output scales relative to swept area rather than height.
I am usually sceptical about vertical axis but this seems more interesting than most designs. It could be a good fit for commercial buildings if installation is simple enough. And maybe could be placed temporarily on agricultural land during winter. And you could see the concept being applied in other ways such as with sun shields on buildings.
A windy night.
> The upper reservoir (Llyn Stwlan) and dam of the Ffestiniog Pumped Storage Scheme in North Wales. The lower power station has four water turbines which generate 360 MW of electricity within 60 seconds of the need arising.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/water/pumped-storage-hydropower
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...
[0] https://www.opb.org/article/2022/01/10/pumped-storage-hydrop... [1] https://slenergystorage.com/
I was hunting for the video of the "where water is being released to make sure that there is sufficient volume in the river for the hydro plant at the proper time to meet the expected demand" - https://youtu.be/jvnaiHFT6nQ
This is repeated often, but is wholly false, each time.
Often it comes with a claim that an existing, elevated watershed is needed, which is false. A watershed is needed only for regular hydro generation. Most places suitable for that already have dams, many of which can be used for pumped hydro storage. Many are. But that is just a matter of convenience. The claim is often made hoping to confuse readers.
Some claim an existing elevated lake is needed, which is false. An earthen dike at a hilltop suffices. Such a dike may be needed only at one end of the reservoir.
Some insist an expensive concrete dam is needed to provide enough "head" to store much energy. They either have not heard of a penstock, or pretend. An earthen dike suffices. "Head" is the height of the hill, not the depth of water behind the dike.
Some insist a copious water supply is needed, which is false. Water may be stored at the bottom and pumped back up, with only evaporative losses. Such loss may be reduced by floating solar PV on the reservoir. Some places can use sea water.
Some insist a mountain is required, where in fact a hill suffices. The greater the altitude, the more energy each ton of water stores, but a few hundred meters height is plenty. In places with underground cavities, even the hill is optional. Using an underground cavity for the lower reservoir can radically increase the head available, vs. just a hill.
Few places are very far from any hill, or cannot afford evaporative loss from a reservoir. Such places will use other storage.
This seems like an over simplification. At a minimum it needs to be an earthen dyke on a strata suitable for retaining water, right? It needs to be located in an appropriate area, near suitable grid infrastructure to ship the power out and road access to get workers and equipment in. Lots of mountainous regions are highly valued for their natural beauty which makes large infrastructure projects more challenging.
The bottom of the reservoir needs to be impermeable. It is well understood by civil engineers how to achieve this.
Earth-moving equipment is very good at getting to places you would not want to try driving your car into (unless, I gather, you are French). Generation and pumping equipment remains at the bottom of the hill. An earthen dike on a hilltop can be as inconspicuous as you care to make it.
You do need wires from there to where the power is, as usual.
Perhaps you could refrain from making snarky comments about minor spelling errors which clearly didn't impact your understanding until you understand dyslexia better?
> The bottom of the reservoir needs to be impermeable. It is well understood by civil engineers how to achieve this.
Understood isn't the same as economically feasible. It's not a trivial issue.
> Earth-moving equipment is very good at getting to places you would not want to try driving your car into
Earth-moving equipment isn't designed to make long distance overland journeys. They are typically delivered to a work site at most hundreds of yards from where they are needed.
> Generation and pumping equipment remains at the bottom of the hill
You still need to get the equipment there so the bottom of the hill needs to be near a road. And you don't want miles of penstock because that will reduce the dynamic head pressure due to friction losses.
The point is there are constraints which you are pretending just don't exist.
Dozens were built in California's Sierra Nevada range in the 1920s using pulley-operated equipment. Those were actually hydro power reservoirs feeding penstocks that have since had pumps attached.
Power loss from flow in penstocks is typically negligible.
If this dike could retain water it would most likely be a lake. Unless there's no rainfall around, but then there's no water to pump up.
Also eff whatever land creatures and plants live there, right?
So the $10bn on snowy plus $10bn AU of renewables can provide about the same contribution as 4GW or $40-60bn AU of nukes.
You're really selling pumped hydro.
So if you add some PV panels and wind turbines around it, it's just like a nuclear reactor but cheaper?
Let’s compare solar growth with pumped storage growth. In 2010, US had 0.9 GW of installed solar power generation capacity. In 2020, it has 19 GW of installed capacity. That’s 2100% growth. In the same time period, pumped storage has grown from 21.5 GW to 22.8 GW. That’s 6% growth.
When should I expect to see significant growth of pumped hydro storage? I am willing to bet $500 that by 2030, pumped hydro generating capacity will not grow to more than 40 GW, while solar capacity will most definitely double by then. Will you take the other side of this bet?
And that is, in fact, what is being done.
The only error is in spending less on renewable generating capacity than the looming catastrophe demands. I recommend you put your $500 there, instead.
But it is far from clear that we will have enough spare renewable generating capacity deployed by 2030 to charge up storage, most places. 2040 seems more likely, provided global civilization has not collapsed by then. We will need to start on factories to make the equipment needed to provide storage well before we need the storage. Factories take appallingly long to build.
Hydrogen via electrolysis is an alternative, I think? Less efficient, but stays for longer and can be used either in a fuel cell or an ICE engine.
And they finish it with
> This analysis shows that AeroMINEs can be installed at $2,400/kW. Finally, at optimum performance AeroMINE systems can reach a LCOE of 10 C/kWh at just over 5 m/s average annual wind speed, which is highly competitive with a solar PV installation
How is the "analysis" showing that? There is no cost analysis in the paper and they never tested speeds of 5 m/s.
It misses the obvious improvement where the platform rotates. I guess this is necessary for their costs target, but I don't think anybody would build this on practice without it.
> $2,400/kW
Anyway, isn't solar cheaper than that nowadays? I think the entire framing of competing with it is flawed, this should be complementing solar to reduce battery costs.
Perhaps we could go full acre-foot here, and use the kilowatt-day per year. So a 100,000kWday/yr installation can provide 2kW to 500 homes for a hundred days.
Those of you who are aesthetically repelled by batteries using amp-hours instead of joules will really hate this one. But it gets at the difference between maximum continuous power, and total energy delivered per installation.
So, big 'it depends'. Anywhere where the wind averages the working speed more often than the sun averages the working luminosity will make wind cheaper in relative terms, and vice versa for solar.
For comparison with the OP system, an average 6kw system producing 8Mwh per year, with a conservative 15 year lifespan works out to AUD$0.075 per kwh.
($1AUD is currently USD$0.65)
it is in the current climate, with shady marketing and clickbait journalism producing three dozen such headlines every day
I built a new database engine that I claim is at least 2x faster than Postgres at queries without needing separate indexes on the table columns. I don't claim it will always be that much faster on every query, but I show several instances where it is not only 2x faster, but 10x faster. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVICKCkWMZE
Without a video like this, I would not expect anyone to take my claims seriously.
These turbines may or may not be a good deal for many sites, but you sure can't tell that it's even a question from this article.
Can someone explain to me how, whenever wind energy is mentioned, any sort of of scepticism, and I don't mean "snarky internet contrarian" scepticism, I mean "human being who has lived on Earth" scepticism, ceases to exist?
Is there actually a large population out there who has never experienced outside weather conditions in which there was no wind?
Or do you... think that bad things will not happen to you if you just believe in transparent bullshit hard enough? Because I'm sorry, but they will.
How. Does this Shit. Get Written?
The best, most reliable sources of wind, FYI, are known by anyone in industry to be very far away from most built structures, and high.
Over a geographic area approximating typical grid distribution distances, and at altitudes reached by commercial wind turbines? Surely there's such a population, but it's a very, very small one. A "calm day" in your backyard at sea level with a bunch of trees around is still generating a ton of wind power on hilltop turbines. And if your neighborhoods hills aren't getting it done, there are gusts somewhere within a few hundred km just waiting to be milked.
No, this is wrong. Wind power is in fact extremely reliable, especially when you remember that things like fuel distribution routinely idles fossil fuel plants too. Nothing is 100% reliable.
But the other part of your point: that building roofs are a poor place for wind, is I think more defensible. Certainly if you have $N to spend on wind power, you build more ridgeline turbines and you don't put these things on roofs. But the people spending those dollars aren't the same.
If you're a business or home with a roof, and you're looking at putting solar on it for whatever reason, and this thing is better (itself very much an open question), why not?
According to [0], Germany's wind farms averaged a 36.9% capacity factor over the course of 2019. Further down there's load duration curves, and it looks like a lot of plants have no power generation for >10% of the time.
EDIT I FORGOT TO INCLUDE MY CITE https://energynumbers.info/germanys-offshore-wind-capacity-f...
Those aren't the right metrics. First, capacity factor is an approximation of "fraction of maximum", not reliability at all, which is a whole-grid measurement.
Find the data for any one gas plant. How often was it producing (emphasis in the original) no power? I'll bet anything that most plants are offline quite a bit more than 10%, precisely because demand itself is variable and gas is the easiest plant to bring up and down. Yet you call one a "reliability" metric and the other not, why?
In fact as a whole, German wind power has been exceedingly reliable. Wind power everywhere has been exceedingly reliable. The world as a whole has been building out wind like crazy over the last decade (because it's cheap and great) and... I'm not aware of even one instance of a "calm day blackout". Not one. Have a cite for that?
Fossil and nuclear plants routinely run at 90% of nameplate capacity. If a gas plant is down more often than that, it's because that plant is a peaker, which exists to make up for things like, say, the wind dying down.
I'm sure there's a somewhat tedious discussion to be had about how France's recent adventures with their decaying nuke plants affect that 90%. Have at it if this interests you.
Uk has wind capacity factor "long-term average of around 27%". https://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/publications/downloads/sinden06-win...
The reason is that wind generation is optimal during a certain wind speed, and less or no power is generated if winds are too slow or too fast. And wind power blackout occurs not only during calm days, but also during very stormy days. In total there is plenty of occurrences when a specific area has no wind at all. The correlation in weather can be seen in wind farms as far as 800 miles apart. https://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/publications/downloads/sinden06-win...
2021 was a year of very low wind speeds across whole northern europe. https://climate.copernicus.eu/esotc/2021/low-winds
Additionally, wind power may be going down in strength... due to climate change https://www.ft.com/content/d53b5843-dbe0-4724-8adf-75c66127e...
That was absolutely what I was not doing. That was a counterfactual presented to refute the grandparent, who was.
Ah, hell. It was meant to be 'https://energynumbers.info/germanys-offshore-wind-capacity-f...', which was Google's infobox for when I searched 'germany wind power capacity factor'.
> Find the data for any one gas plant. How often was it producing (emphasis in the original) no power? I'll bet anything that most plants are offline quite a bit more than 10%, precisely because demand itself is variable and gas is the easiest plant to bring up and down. Yet you call one a "reliability" metric and the other not, why?
I call wind's lack of production a reliability metric because I don't get to choose when the lack of production happens. My home's generator might only run for <1% of the year, but as long as it runs when I need it it's perfectly reliable.
> I'm not aware of even one instance of a "calm day blackout". Not one. Have a cite for that?
What's a 'calm day blackout'? Is it when there's no power produced by an individual wind farm, or is it when rolling blackouts happen because the wind farm didn't produce enough power, in conjunction with the rest of the power system?
The former is pretty common as shown in the link, and you could arguably say that Texas's winter blackouts from a few years back were an example of the latter. (lots and lots of both demand and generation issues in that scenario, but wind didn't come out covered in roses either, and while wind wasn't expected to produce much power in the winter there to begin with 'we don't expect this source to produce much power in the winter' is not a fantastic argument in favor of it being reliable)
The fact a few people might misinterpret it is a marketing bonus, but surely negligable, because no one could believe that.
> being in effect, continuing, or lasting 24 hours a day : CONSTANT
I'd expect that they have a rotation of maybe 12 people patrolling for 2h and then switching, so someone is patrolling at every minute.
It's like if your lie is so bad, and if you can still get a small amount of people to believe you, they will fall HARD to it, and you can scam them multiple times because they continue to fall for them. That's the target audience.
EDIT:
====
Don't shoot the messenger. I don't agree with it either.
They’re not - they’re free to buy a house without an HOA
If enough of us do this, the price of HOA properties will drop due to decreased demand and people will more broadly recognize HOAs as the liability they are.
Nobody wants to live under the thumb of an HOA.
Without the HOA busy-bodies, suburban neighborhoods tend to turn into the kind of place most people would not aspire to live.
Often, HOAs are annoying. More often it's like teenagers who hate it when mom makes them clean their rooms.
From my perspective, the HOA has done little except offer a pool, and insist once that I remove an almost completely invisible stump in my front lawn that was over my water line.
Annoying things my HOA does: I had to replace some plants in my yard because they were not technically shrubs, and the rules said I had to have shrubs.
“Forced” in the sense that they voluntarily enter them by buying a house in an HOA.
Each HOA (or lack thereof) is a property of the house you are looking to buy. Complaining about being forced to take the HOA is like complaining about being forced to be a part of the county.
No, it's like complaining that the lawn has been saturated with salt so that it can never grow properly, and a previous owner somehow managed to legally enshrine that so that you can't fix it.
> Americans love freedom and small government so much, they have to invent a worse and more invasive replacement.
The same group of Americans, too. HOAs were like a GPL for racists.
The whole goal of smaller and more localized governing bodies is that you have easier access to change them. The only thing stopping you is getting the support of your neighbors.
Just because there are elections doesn't make it a fair system.
I have an HOA in my neighborhood for example. It has no power to levy fines at all.
More specifically, it's run by people who live in the area they are governing and have nothing else to do with their time.
Not sure what can be done about this; it's a general failure mode of democratic systems at every level (and many non-democratic as well): over time, the power goes to those who prioritize getting the power. I.e. career politicians.
(Yes, I'd classify the few people who show up at our HOA-equivalent meetings as career politicians, and the small group of troublemakers in my block of flats as the opposition :).)
If you have an overriding right to a ham antenna, you can threaten to put one up if they don't back down over something else. (To be clear, this would be a good thing.) If you already have one, you could threaten to expand it.
And there are laws being passed across the country making solar access a legal right for all home owners.
Plus, I doubt these would work on typical suburban houses, given their roof pitch. Houses would need to be designed with flat roofs in mind in order to accommodate these things. Thus, you're looking at this being applied to new construction in most of the USA.
on what grounds?
Basically:
If the buildings are condos or townhomes, then the building is owned by the HOA. In a condo, the homeowner owns from the paint inwards. In a townhouse, the HOA owns the structural elements, but in short, the homeowner owns the sheetrock and paint on "their" side of the walls. Exterior walls and roofs are owned by the HOA.
If the buildings are detached single family houses, then the building is owned by the homeowner.
again, I think the whole notion is silly and counterproductive, just reporting on reality.
OP is right, HOAs can be a nightmare for someone wanting to install solar. I’m dealing with this in one of my units currently.
Furthermore, there is research done on solar panels all the time too to increase their efficiency and panels have and continue to improve their W/m2. So by that time, solar panels might have outpaced it.
This "same cost" is likely calculated as initial cost + electricity/24h instead of initial cost + maintenance cost + lifetime.
Other comments have mentioned the moving parts which don't exist on solar panels. Moving parts will inevitably fail in contrast to solar panels which often outlast their 25 year warranties with only reduced efficiency.
Wind is less predictable than sun too. It's also less powerful the lower the height is due to buildings blocking it. That's why wind turbines are so high and usually out of cities.
Cost is not the only factor that matters. Panels on rooftops are more or less not visible. This thing sticks out a lot and isn't aesthetically pleasing.
If you drive through the great plains states, you'll pass hundreds of these going far as the eye can see. They can't require that much ongoing maintenance, because it would be untenable to do so at that scale.
I get that these are different designs, but the fundamental constraint of being low maintenance has to be a design requirement.
Regarding strong wind, some wind energy technologies are self limiting, like the savonius rotor. I have no idea how the approach mentionen in the article handles strong winds.
This mainly just means the desert is a dumb place to put a solar farm. But ignorant investors love the idea of desert solar farms, so there is plenty of money being wasted building desert solar farms.
A lot of green power on the West Coast. Do you have a study that looks at the effects of soot particles accumulating on solar panels? Or pollen for that matter? I've washed my car more in the last three years than in the entire rest of my adult life.
> Aeromine said... the patented system is motionless and virtually silent
Edit: This is just a quote from the article! I'm only trying to provide context from the article to the above comment. There's no need to signal your disagreement with this quote by voting on it.
It would appear to fly off at supersonic speeds as it ignored -earth's rotation -earth's movement around sun -solar system's movement around the galaxy -galaxy's drift through the universe
(Sorry "no motion" is like a claim out of a Dilbert cartoon)
Calling it "motionless" is truly bizarre.
Checking out the company who makes these, https://www.aerominetechnologies.com, I see they position it for larger buildings, including multi-family residential, but not large single-family homes, but I feel motivated to see whether this might be a good solution for my case instead of installing solar.
> The unit requires about 10% of the space required by solar panels and generates round-the-clock energy.
Let's be generous here and use numbers for my area, which further north than all of US excluding Alaska. I can get just over 200W of electricity per m^2 from solar (peak) with standard ~20% efficient panels here and 200kWh per year.
So with this I should be getting 2MWh per m^2 per year with an average power output of almost 230W and much higher peak as it is generally much more windy during the day.
So 1m^2 footprint of this device would match performance of standard 3.5-4m diameter wind turbine (9.6-12.5 m^2) assuming a sane if slightly optimistic average annual wind speed of 4m/s.
I find that super hard to believe.
In residential solar, panels are largely subsidized by federal ITC or financed by banks claiming the tax equity which covers the maintenance, upfront costs, etc; hence the zero upfront residential solar model. Will this be similar?
The trick is having a well integrated system that doesn't waste power but instead works with batteries, grid, and EVs to make sure you waste as little as possible of the free energy your panels generate when they are producing rather than just serving excess power to your neighbors via the grid at some token value that your power supplier sets. There are some nice solutions emerging in this space.
Those units are supposed to be quite good as a dump for excess solar power.
I can smell a new industry I just cannot understand the leverage points
Maybe the issue with urban farming is that water is subsidized, and those people use a lot of it.
For one thing, it's hideous.
But mostly it's intended to be installed on the ridge of a standard commercial flat roof, tar-paper style, and take advantage of the effect which large walls have on the wind.
Houses, being lower, having (generally) pitched roofs, and therefore no structural ridge, are not the intended market.
There are definitely moving parts in that video -- does it have to be cleaned? Do the bearings wear out? Will a bird nest in it? Fill with leaves?
I definitely hope it works but I'm skeptical this is really as mindlessly easy to do as to drop panels on a residential house.
If nothing else, there is a lot of security to be gained from the fact that wind speed is anti-correlated with sunshine in many places.
We shouldn't overlook options, but we can absolutely look, do a cost/benefit analysis, and then discard options that don't make sense.
I’m not sure how a wind turbine would fair with winter weather. I would think they could be subject to icing like any other propeller—-reducing their output and possibly creating mechanical damage. Aviation has certainly thought about that problem a lot, so there might be solutions.
The amount of energy you can extract from the wind is a function of swept area for a conventional wind turbine. I don't see how this is going to be much different, even if it is incredibly efficient. "swept area" in the video is, what, around 6 square meters? So about the same as a wind turbine of 1.9m in diameter. If it has the same efficiency, we're talking about maybe 1600W maximum.
The design may, or may not be good and dependable, and may, or may not require less maintenance than a conventional wind turbine.
But a lot of the problem is mounting it on a roof. There's a reason why the commercial units are being built bigger and bigger, and higher and higher. The higher up you go, the more steady and strong the wind becomes. At rooftop level, a lot of the wind is blocked by trees and buildings.
So I don't care how good the turbine design is, mounting it on a roof isn't a great solution for generating much power.
Its amazing. Been using it for like 2.5/3 years now and it has really helped in becoming energy independent. Don't have batteries yet as the tech is unproven here, but on grid-off grid without batteries already has given us more usable energy during the day when the grid goes.
I can't imagine this working for anything except maybe charging laptops, or other battery devices.
That's a pretty sneaky way of implying that it provides energy at all times, when it probably just provides energy when the wind is blowing, whether that is during the day or night. There's nothing in the article about any energy storage capacity included with these things, apart from the claim that it can minimize auxiliary storage requirements.
why not a bigger single installation? seems like this is rotating a tunnel internally, not motionless.
Looks like there s no shortage of good ideas to generate energy but how do we store it
The nice thing about solar and wind together is that they are complimentary - wind usually starts to pick up right when solar starts to fall off. Here is a helpful dashboard from ERCOT in Texas: https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards/combinedwindand.... Usually what happens is that when the sun starts to go down, winds starts to pick up. This was critical when we had near-capacity conditions this summer when it got so hot.
https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c...
I don't want 40 of these highly visible things on the edge of my roof.
It doesn't have to be one or the other ignoring costs
If they don't outright state swept area or rated speed, assume a random house will see 5-10% capacity factor. This is why wind is huge and only in specific places.
Plus anything over about 200W per household on average will create turbulence which will mean the neighbors can't also get that much.
Wind is for utility (where it still dominates for now in northern climes) and select industrial or commercial sites.
The real question which the article should be asking is how they compare to traditional large turbines. (Which can stand unobstructed at great heights). How well this works in urban environments, where Wind is blocked/funneled by other buildings. Or if the claims over solar are actually justified.
Far too often there are articles about blatant vaporware (often fusion) where people just report sone companies claims as if it were self evidently true. If you want to convince me: - Show actual data. What did one such unit generate over a few month in electricity? Surely you have to know. - Do not lie. The thing obviously is neither motionless nor bladeless.
It's good to have options and I don't think the world will ever be "solar OR wind" - they compliment each other and can provide redundancy.
The interesting thing here is Rooftop seems to focused on selling to consumers (?) as opposed to industrial scale turbines or solar farms. For my personal (off the grid) energy needs one/two 100w panels are sufficient but nice to see a less "dangerous looking" wind catcher.
This probably has less installation than solar and I'm curious about the lifespan/service intervals of the mechanism
The only promising thing I found for rooftops is something that is placed on the nave of your roof (hope I'm using the right word, I mean the highest part) and the wind blowing over the surface ends up concentrating there. Should be out of sight and reasonably performant. But it was all still proof of concept stage from what I remember.
I'm curious how this project will pan out. I hope good, but the article doesn't mention what their innovation is other than proposing to put a whole array on one's roof.