Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

"... a solution to one of the most pressing issues in the green energy landscape – how to produce small-scale, affordable, generators of clean wind energy."

Wrong problem, unless you're in an isolated area. There are already good wind turbines for isolated plants. That's more a ruggedness problem than an efficiency problem.

There are good reasons wind turbines have become huge. The big ones are far more cost-effective, partly because wind speeds are higher around 100-200m from the ground. 1970s wind turbines were in the 10KW-20KW range. Pacheco Pass in California had row after row of them. Now, 1MW is small, and the little ones have been removed.

Here's a video of the thing.[1] No info about how much power they get out, but it's probably under a kilowatt. Three standard solar planels will produce more than that, and would fit in about the same ground space.

This is a decorative object, not a power source. It's in the same category as energy-generating sidewalks.[2] These are Rule of Cool devices, not useful energy sources.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StLyTZazgVE

[2] https://www.archdaily.com/911965/sidewalks-that-generate-ene...

I agree, however our 5kW solar roof in southern England has barely generated 1kWh/day since October. Apart from that still period in November we've got wind, generally 10-15mph at roof height.

A feasible home wind turbine would be a good addition in winter.

Or buying a share of a massive wind turbine, but the maths of Ripple Energy have never stacked up when I've looked at it.

Looking at urban landscapes in Europe in general I expect diminishing returns with everyone placing a useful windmill. And it would be ugly as hell no matter what (imagine every roof having one of these monstrosities).

Hello from 50-55 degrees latitude where we get our heads blown off by the jet stream all. the. time.

Yours might be HN's first comment from South Georgia!

I’ll learn to not mix those two sometime in the next decade. Pinky promise

Pop culture and mainstream politics affect people’s opinions in a weird way. Only in the USA and some part of the western world, people see wind turbines as “ugly”. Coming from another part where wind turbines are picking up very fast, the words I have heard are “amazing” and “elegant”.

Until you're living near one of them, and constantly hear the low thump, thump, thump their blades make when passing lowest point, and as such their very own mast, by necessity.

At varying speeds.

Indeed. I regard wind turbines as striking kinetic sculptures in the landscape.

Make them sparkle and glitter. Can't be more ugly than the forests of countless antennas for terrestial TV, which were not that uncommon not too long ago, or the satellite dishes pointing south to GEO.

From what I hear the showstopper for home wind turbines is the noise. Even the quietest ones produce some sound, which at your house when you're trying to sleep is annoying.

I'd imagine things with moving parts need alot of maintenance too.

Agree on Ripple Energy especially for the way the tax worked on it.

Their solar offer seemingly made even less financial sense, due to the very high cost of paying for your slice of the huge costs of running the national grid. The only reason for going with it would be environmental (effectively subsidising sustainable energy on the grid to displace other sources)

> It's in the same category as energy-generating sidewalks.

I met a guy who did one of those. Huge scam artist vibes, but people absolutely threw greenwashing money at him and could not stop writing articles.

Obviously no concrete numbers in his flashy "decks" because they were all completely terrible and made no practical sense if you actually did the numbers (watt-minutes per day if I recall).

Thanks for including a video. The original article fails to even add a picture of the thing.

I'm most sceptical of the storm rating of this rig. Putting large rotating sheets on city roofs seems like a hazard nobody would want to take up for a few watts.

Fortunately it's usually cheap enough to tie them down when the time for the second round of maintenance comes. The rooftops of high status building projects in regions prone to greenwashing already are a cemetery of abandoned microturbines of various designs.

It's includes the picture with the creators. Turbine is in the background. But it is of such unconventional form that i guess no one understands that this is the turbine (including me)

Why should we grant the editor any slack? Out of focus and partially occluded is of no use and does not count as picture of the thing.

I saw that picture and thought it was a test size model, not the real thing.

It's conventional. There are lots of "how I built a small vertical wind turbine from scrap parts" articles and videos.[1][2] This is easy to do and worth it for off-grid locations. Most people just cut blades out of some cylinder such as a metal or plastic barrel. The Birmingham people just optimized the blades a bit.

Note the lack of a direct comparison with a simple blade form vertical wind turbine.

Nothing wrong with doing this, but the hype is excessive.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-WkJI5TtmQ

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ti9FkEg8G_Y

Looked like just another https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical-axis_wind_turbine (VAWT) to me, the blades not that different from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darrieus_wind_turbine in so called 'helical' form. But hey, such AI, much WOW!

I'm not sure the product is the real story here. It's probably just a way to sell their design process.

I have no way of judging how valuable it is, but achieveng 7x improvement in efficiency of this wind turbine, and the team this company has[1] may hint their process could be quite valuable.

[1]https://evophase.co.uk/team/

I am deeply sceptical of the 7x claim. It's easy to find a great improvement when you chose a bad baseline. For example if you just plonk a traditional fan-on-a-stick in the same place, it will probably be terrible, but there are non-AI upright designs that might be in the same ballpark. I don't doubt they have a way to make substantial site-specific design adjustments, but I do doubt that much improvement over the most suitable but not customised design you can already buy today.

Also the AI angle is pretty silly hype because multidimensional optimisation techniques have been part of the industrial design toolbox for decades. Wind turbine companies are very keenly aware of optimisation algorithms for squeezing everything out of a blade geometry. CFD is an entire field for a reason.

Random 2006 article in numerical optimisation of vertical wind turbines from a careless search: https://iawe.org/Proceedings/CWE2006/MC3-01.pdf

Thanks for the video link. I attended Birmingham University (long ago). That looks like the Muirhead Tower in the background. I mention that only because the passage underneath that building was a well known wind tunnel, presumably due to poor 60s building design. But it would actually be a good place to put that wind turbine given the gales that the building generated.

> No info about how much power they get out, but it's probably under a kilowatt. Three standard solar planels will produce more than that

Not in Birmingham though…

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