One KW wind turbine without civil engineering | Hacker News Reader

One KW wind turbine without civil engineering

windtowatt.com

45 pointsskywal_l30 comments

Many questions.

A couple:

* 1m² = 1x2m? 4m² = 2x4m? etc. I'm confused by this.

* Why 25 m² (5x10 m) = 20.8kW, but 100 m² (10x20 m) = 62.4kW? 4x the size in m², but only ~3x the power? Shouldn't it be 83.2kW, not 62.4kW? It doesn't make sense efficiency would drop....

* You're speccing this as having a 25 year life (with $50/yr maintenance). I'm feeling a bit doubtful that zip-tied tarps under UV and dynamic load are going to last that long, to be honest. The tracking system also seems extremely susceptible to dirt etc.

* This thing looks pretty janky. I'm also not convinced a good 20-year storm wouldn't completely wreck it. Proper wind turbines have the ability to weather-vane into the wind, lock the rotor, etc etc. Again, in it's current incarnation, I'm doubtful it would survive.

* Your "guaranteed Cp of .32" seems... optimistic. Given it looks like you've built actual units, what are your real-world results vs the CFD numbers?

I would guess 1x2 is that the wheel is 1m wide, 2m diameter. This would mean that there is a 1m^2 sized flap* that the wind pushes against.

*technical term

Ah, I think you're correct. Although the watts per square meter still don't make sense.

The price does seem steep for something so simple it could be modelled with straws in three minutes, but I don't really understand the rest of the negativity.

Don't we want innovation in renewables? Shouldn't we be encouraging this kind of thing, trying out different designs to the traditional windmills and trying to make something easy to build, scale, install and operate?

When people are asking for money, it is entirely reasonable to apply some skepticism to the sales pitch.

In this case, they're charging a lot of money for a flimsy-looking product that is unlikely to capture much energy (low wind speeds at ground level).

Um, yes. 4,900€ for a 1KW device. That's way above market price.

On Amazon, a 1KW wind turbine is $500 to $1000. About half that on Alibaba. This is a common technology now, with lots of makers. Almost everybody sells a bladed turbine that mounts on top of a pole and has a tailfin to make it pivot in the wind.

What's with this thing? It's at ground level. It's expensive. It's built out of plastic tarps that probably won't survive a storm. The scheme for making it follow the wind looks flaky. Their "business plan" consists of copies of the business cards of people they met at a trade show.[1]

When I read this article, I was near a little 200W wind turbine at a horse barn. Little five-bladed thing up on a pole, with a tail that makes it follow the wind. It powers a few lights. It's been running for years now with no attention. It's 2026, people. This stuff just works.

[1] https://www.windtowatt.com/doc/Market%20Validation%20En.pdf

Based on the website, it looks like their primary strategic advantage is ease of portability / shipping for off grid scenarios.

The fact that it is made of plastic tarps means there's very little specialty material that is needed to repair damage, unlike relatively fragile turbine blades that need a bit more care when shipping, frequent assembling and disassembling and weather, etc.

I'll go on record as saying that I don't think that those advantages come close to making up for the cost, and I'd like to think they plan on bringing the cost down significantly when they grow up... but I'm not really holding my breath there either.

If we ignore the price, which is astronomical and silly, then everything else is forgiveable, I think.

Yes it's made from plastic tarp, which makes it lightweight and easy to manufacture or repair. Yes it's got low potential at ground level but that makes it far safer and simpler to install.

This design or a variation of it could be built with PVC pipe and plastic bags and deployed in a field for next to nothing, bringing power to a community that didn't have any.

It's insanity to want to charge near 5k for this, but if this was an open source / free thing we'd all be championing the ingenuity

Consumer solar has been a game changer, so doing the same for wind would be a huge innovation. But the reasons everyone doesn't already have wind generators on their roof is it's a much harder problem to solve. Not least of which is wind speeds are significantly lower closer to the ground. So I expect their 1kw output has a very narrow "optimal conditions" window. This might work if you live in a desert? Though given enough time with climate change...

Yes. The power in wind is proportional to the cube of wind speed - which falls significantly as you get closer to the ground especially in a typical residential setting. Anything below 15m is going to struggle to deliver any kind of useful power.

And wind turbine power scales with the square of the blade length. Which is why turbine blade designs have completely displaced this sort of "wind catching surface" device which scales linearly at best in terms of materials. Solar PV scales linearly which is what makes small and domestic PV practical.

The advances in wind power over the last decade or so have come from engineering bigger and bigger blades.

I don't see domestic wind power ever being practical at all but especially given the competition of solar PV even far from the equator.

I’ve been looking for a wind turbine you could deploy on the roof. I’ve got 15 kW of inverter capacity available.

So far my conclusion has been that it’s not yet time for this.

Wouldn't noise be a concern?

And what is the failure mode?

Also vibrations. Wind turbines are not meant to be close to residential areas.

Won't these things just fall off your roof though?

If don't bolt them down, sure

https://ridgeblade.com/rb1-residential/ looks like the closest thing that I'd want, but with the storms we get I'd hate to think of what kind of pressure that'd put on the structure of the roof.

There are exceptionaly well understood minimum requirements needed to build wing turbines and other primary power equipment, the thing shown quite clearly meets none of them, and in fact appears to be built like a folding lawn chair, or perhaps an umbrella, but in any case, not the sort of thing you leave to the mercy of the wind.

1 kW, 4,900€ for what looks like a mediocre high school science fair project?

You could build something as good with duct tape and an old washing machine for the cost of picking it up for free when the owner is trying to get rid of it without paying to have it picked up.

The Vevor 1 kW wind mill that looks like a windmill instead of TechCrunch×MadMax is $300.

To be fair, it looks more like an undergrad science project.

What would a civil engineer have to do with designing a small wind turbine?

I could see a tower requiring a permit if it goes above some height, but even then it's not likely to need an engineering sign-off unless it goes especially high.

These people are charging for the f'ing IP! They won't let you just use the design, they want to profit off of you paying them royalties.

For a single unit project or workshop thing to make, just because, sure... Maybe? But for 4900 euros? What are they smoking? I'm rather skeptical of the rendering shot of dozens of these in a bare field.

The mechanical cost and complexity and maintenance issues will surely be more costly and hassle prone over a 5-10 year time span than buying three 400W PV panels (1200W STC rating) and mounting them using some similar hack job DIY ballasted ground mount.

The rotating/moving thing at ground level also seems like a good way to mangle pets, wildlife and small children.

If you really want a "1kW" wind turbine? There's a reasonable number of different chinese domestic manufacturing sources for vertical axis turbines that are nominally rated at 1kW in a brisk wind. And you can mount them on a thick pole 3 meters off the ground so that nobody can stick their arm into it.

Chinese souces? The EU recently introduced additional taxes on China because we’re now supposed buy “superior EU products”, it’s for our own good because according to Ursula Chinese products are “low quality” and “dangerous”. Better trust the politicians on this one, the 5k euro AI slop wind turbine is clearly the better and safer choice.

Given all the flat surfaces on this, I wonder how much more difficult it would be to turn the flat surfaces from canvas into solar panels.

Looks like AI slop marketing, feels like a scam.

Can't imagine it would survive the first descent storm. Unlike conventiolnal turbines, it doesn't seem to have any way of protecting itself.

Is there anything on the website that isn't "AI" generated? Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear :(

Their "technical validation (CFD)" document looks like AI slop...

Wait 1kW is actually €5k? Lol they have the audacity to describe it as low cost.

Also if you have a real project (which this seems to be), don't get AI to slop out your website. Terrible look.

But what about muh agentic workflow and vibe coding? Are you suggesting we should write code MANUALLY in the big 26?!

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