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Rooftop wind energy innovation claims 50% more energy than solar at same cost
- lifeisstillgood 4y agoI think there is a hybrid future coming - and I suspect farmers will be at the forefront of this - hills with steps full of these built in, marginal fields providing pv-solar. I can smell a new industry I just cannot understand the leverage points
- aruanavekar 4y agohttps://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/25/climate/energy-transition-solar-wind.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/25/climate/energy-transition...
- DrNosferatu 4y agoPrice per kWh?
- chess_buster 4y agoThis is the question.
- bpodgursky 4y agoRooftop solar is essentially drop-and-forget -- you have to do approximately 0 maintenance for the next 10 years (at least). 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.
- 2Gkashmiri 4y agoI own one. 5.6 kWh I think. 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.
- Aachen 4y agoWhat type of turbine do you have and what's your environment like? Do you live in a city or on a farm or something in between?
- 2Gkashmiri 4y agosolar
- Aachen 4y agoOh, oops
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y agoWait, are you saying that you're off grid and don't have batteries? Do you just lose power if there's no wind?
- bpodgursky 4y agoI'm pretty confused about this... I don't think any household devices are willing to gracefully power down when the wind stops for a minute. Like, what's a microwave going to do when voltage drops? I can't imagine this working for anything except maybe charging laptops, or other battery devices.
- pencilguin 4y ago"On-grid/off-grid" seems here to mean on-grid when it is not producing enough.
- halfmatthalfcat 4y agoIn snowy climates, brushing off panels is a pain in the ass and heating solutions result in net neutral generation for the most part, so there’s no point. In heavily overcast climates, recouping costs from installation takes dramatically more time. Wind is ubiquitous and doesn’t run into these problems…
- Steltek 4y agoWho brushes off their panels? Snow comes crashing down off mine within 24 hours of the storm. The whole house shakes in a very unnerving manner as it hits the porch roof. How do you brush off snow without risking damage anyway?
- micromacrofoot 4y agoI never brush snow off my panels. It slides off after a couple days at worst (and does a nice job of cleaning in the process). TBH I don't really care because my production is very low in winter anyway.
- teeray 4y agoNot my experience in northern NH. It snows, then the panels are covered for maybe a day, then it all slides off like an avalanche. It’s like having a metal roof. 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.
- zemvpferreira 4y agoI'm with you in that any mechanical system will be more trouble than a photo-electrical system however...we really can't afford to overlook any renewable power sources at this time. 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.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago> we really can't afford to overlook any renewable power sources at this time We shouldn't overlook options, but we can absolutely look, do a cost/benefit analysis, and then discard options that don't make sense.
- loceng 4y agoIt's all quite nuanced, and details are important, things like there will also be noise-vibrational pollution created from wind vs. solar.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ansible 4y agoI am highly skeptical. 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.
- brightball 4y agoI have been wondering about this for years.
- Aachen 4y agoI've looked into it but the results, unless you live in an open field or an otherwise windy area or want to build fifty meters into the air, and unless you and your neighbors are fine with moving shadows all day every day, are disappointing. Silent vertical turbines sound cool but far outperformed by solar. Might still make sense to have a mix since batteries won't get us through the winter, but wind turbines are much better suited to fields and forests really. Even a relatively small one (so you don't need to cut down swathes of said forest for access roads and work area) has much better performance than what you'd place on a roof. 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.
- thefourthchime 4y agoForget about all of that. Have you seen this thing? The WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) is going to be near zero on this one.
- bxtt 4y agoHow will this be financed? 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?
- hinkley 4y agoI’ve seen a bunch of people talking about how you need to install solar this year because the subsidies are going away. The whole goal of the subsidy is to get enough of an installed base to get costs down so you don’t need the subsidy. Even if the midterms give us a better Congress, you can’t count on these forever.
- jillesvangurp 4y agoWait a few years and panel prices will drop by more than the subsidies you are receiving now on the existing ones. Even without subsidies, it might be worth it for some people to do right now. It depends on your situation. 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.
- hinkley 4y agoThere’s a company making water heaters that store about 4x the heat per liter of water, and heat the water on demand. I can’t recall if the storage material is solid or liquid so I hesitate to call it a “tankless” system if it has a tank of hot sludge. Those units are supposed to be quite good as a dump for excess solar power.
- bushbaba 4y agoSolar panels are fairly set and forget. No moving parts. For wind curious what kind of maintenance is needed
- ilyt 4y agoI'd imagine once per year or two, any consumables (grease, maybe occasional bearing replacement) would be cheap so you really would be mostly paying for time of someone proficient to do it.
- dont__panic 4y agoWhere I live, I wonder how they'd interact with heavy wind, ice, and snow. I imagine during the winter months you'd have to de-ice them, and potentially clear away wet, heavy snow. Whenever a Noreaster or similar strong wind comes through, I wonder what the chance of damage is -- presumably they automatically shut off if the wind becomes too strong?
- mywittyname 4y agoI'm surprised to hear that these don't have built in heaters for de-icing. 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.
- jansan 4y agoTo be fair, those weather conditions are not optimal for solar power, either. 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.
- tantalor 4y agoFrom the article: > 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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- andsoitis 4y agoFascinating. Checking out the company who makes these, https://www.aerominetechnologies.com 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.
- MajimasEyepatch 4y agoSeems like you need a flat rooftop. Where I live, that's uncommon among single-family homes.
- andsoitis 4y agoFlat rooftops are very common in SoCal, and luxury homes are large. Seems like a potentially good market for them, but yeah, maybe it isn't a big enough market in their calculus.
- dml2135 4y agoIs this truly motionless, or are the turbines just hidden, sort of like those Dyson fans?
- giantg2 4y agoBased on the video, there's definitely internal movement.
- mostly_harmless 4y agoIf you look on their website (https://www.aerominetechnologies.com/ https://www.aerominetechnologies.com/) you can see there is a downward facing turbine hidden underneath
- razster 4y agoFrom what I've seen it does not move. In my area winds come from the north and east, so it would work one direction but not the other. Also, how does the wind channel into the main duct?
- yohannparis 4y agoMotionless in the sense or they do not have to be facing the wind at all time.
- marcosdumay 4y agoYou can see the moving part on the video. It's just internal to the duct.
- constantcrying 4y agoThere is a turbine at the bottom. It just redirects the wind down. Calling it "motionless" is truly bizarre.
- JoeAltmaier 4y agoUpward, I think. The wind thru the vanes sucks air up?
- exabrial 4y agoHome Owners Associations already block solar, unfortunately I give this a 0% chance of getting approved in any neighborhood that has one :( EDIT: ==== Don't shoot the messenger. I don't agree with it either.
- seydor 4y ago> Home Owners Associations already block solar on what grounds?
- micromacrofoot 4y agocurb appeal, my realtor said that solar panels are actually a downside a lot of the time when he's dealing with the higher end of the real estate market
- exabrial 4y agoUsually that "it's an eyesore" or some other BS. That's the entire reason the Tesla solar roof has a market share, is that it "looks like" a normal roof without giant boxes on top of a house. again, I think the whole notion is silly and counterproductive, just reporting on reality.
- doctorhandshake 4y agoIn my understanding, the justification commonly given is that the disruption to the unified neighborhood aesthetics is bad for resale value - resale being the justification HOAs use to block anything they don’t like.
- Tangurena2 4y agoSatellite dishes used to be banned by almost all HOAs in America until the FCC prohibited it. https://spectrumam.com/fcc-regulations-satellite-dishes https://spectrumam.com/fcc-regulations-satellite-dishes 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.
- seydor 4y ago> An Aeromine system typically consists of 20 to 40 units installed on the edge of a building 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
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago> 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/combinedwindandsolar 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.
- kortilla 4y agoBarely. Once the sun goes down the wind usually stops.
- happyopossum 4y agoThat's completely dependent on location and geography. Where I am, it regularly blows all night, only to taper off in the morning...
- hn_throwaway_99 4y agoThat is most definitely untrue for the vast majority of Texas wind farms - I've been following those Ercot graphs ever since Winter Storm Uri.
- seydor 4y agolooking at renewables power generation it seems wind is slightly going down at night too , certainly not picking up https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&stacking=stacked_absolute_area&week=42&source=sw https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c...
- ZetaZero 4y agoThe company has not yet provided any real numbers. I want to know how much electricity is generated at a specific wind speed. The lack of this most basic number leads me to believe this isn't as good as it sounds.
- ortusdux 4y agoI've been fascinated by roof ridgetop fans. They capture the air being funnel up and over the roof to increase their efficiency without increasing their size. The startup RidgeBlade uses a simple ducted squirrel cage fan along the ridgeline, and their studies show a 2.2x efficiency increase on 45deg slope roof. They also work well with solar. https://thepowercollective.ca/products/rb1/ https://thepowercollective.ca/products/rb1/
- jonnycomputer 4y agoWell, the look of them is unobtrusive enough to gain acceptance, I think. But you know anyone with practical real-world experience with one of them? how much electricity produced, how much to install, roi?
- forgotusername6 4y agoThe site says 2kw continuous for the domestic system. That's about half of typical domestic solar installation. I really do wonder if you can get that in a real world environment.
- nofollow 4y agoI'm waiting for Vortex Bladeless: https://vortexbladeless.com/ https://vortexbladeless.com/
- fairytalemtg 4y agoWonder if the funding will come from those that support solar panels like Sunrun, Sunpower.. or new lending sector will form that specialize on lending + insurance for wind equip
- tb_technical 4y agoHow do I get one? I live in a high wind area.
- walnutclosefarm 4y agoThe claims made in the article are too over the top to be able to take them seriously - particularly the idea that wind is somehow going to even out the stochasticity of solar. In most locations, and particularly at the heights implied the notion of "rooftop" wind, wind is just as variable as solar. They might well be partially complementary (there isn't much wind on the best solar days, where I live, but might be good wind on cloudy days; but still, when the sun down goes here, the wind goes with it 4 nights out of five). 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.
- MikeDelta 4y agoAnd upstream turbines will take away the wind from the downstream ones, making them less useful in closely-built environments.
- constantcrying 4y agoThe article just repeats the companies statement. Of course not an ounce of scepticism or doubt is to be found.
- didgetmaster 4y agoI am always skeptical whenever I see a headline that says new technology X can be better, cheaper, or more efficient than existing technology Y, but then fails to show in the actual story how that is true with real numbers. 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.
- VBprogrammer 4y agoScepticism is sometimes a lazy response but in this case I think you are completely correct. 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.
- jakobnissen 4y agoIt's the other way around - cube of wind speed. So wind speed and consistency is critical
- VBprogrammer 4y agoI knew I shouldn't have gone by memory!
- aitchnyu 4y agoHmm, I can imagine a 2 meter blade intercepting 4x the area of the moving air column and capturing 4x the kinetic energy. KE is proportional to the square of velocity. I'm having trouble imagining how a column of air moving 2x the speed generates 8x the power. Does it mean 2x the speed mean 8x the energy that can be captured?
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- Finnucane 4y agoAt least judging by the video, this doesn't look like something that would be a practical choice for a lot of residential situations relative to existing solar options. Maybe on larger apartment buildings? It would be cool if it were, I mean here in New England we get lots of wind, all the time.
- jansan 4y agoI wonder how these compare to old fashioned savonius rotors, which are cheap, silent and omnidirectional. No visible moving parts is nice in residential areas, and I suspect that is their main selling point.
- pornel 4y agoThere's more wind at higher altitudes, so I expect industrial-scale wind farms to have an inherent advantage over any rooftop solution.
- byyll 4y agoI don't think it's worth popularizing such concepts and patents. I've seen plenty of them in the past 2 years and non have reached production and promised value that outperforms solar panels. 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.
- Panino 4y ago> Aeromine said unlike conventional wind turbines that are noisy, visually intrusive, and dangerous to migratory birds, the patented system is motionless and virtually silent. 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 Many other sources agree. 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.
- zaphod12 4y agoI can't speak to the technology, but their CEO and marketing staff have been aggressively crapping on other clean energy sources. They also repeated a lot of lies about solar. I hope the tech is real, the people behind it seem like jerks.
- paulryanrogers 4y agoSurely those stats depend on the prevalence or absence of wind turbines. So if we had as many turbines as buildings they may well be a greater cause of bird deaths.
- mrb 4y agoYou can see technical drawings of their device in their patent (US 11391262): https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/26/02/b1/f9004c8c6a47fb/US11391262.pdf https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/26/02/b1/f9004c8... The article calls it "motionless" and "bladeless", but this is patently (hah!) false. There are actually spinning blades... See figures 16c, 16d, 19 in the patent: the blades are in the turbine underneath the central body element. 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/10.1088/1742-6596/2265/4/042065/pdf 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_coefficient_of_performance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betz%27s_law#Betz's_law_and_co... ) so that seems to confirm my intuition.
- foxyv 4y agoI think they mean that the blades are not visible from ground level. A big problem with wind turbines in residential areas is the motion is really distracting and shadows on windows can be annoying as heck. Although looking at the patent, this thing would be stopped up with dead squirrels on my house in ten minutes unless they added some grating to the inlet.
- hoosieree 4y agoThe blades are spinning so fast cleanup becomes a simple matter of wiping off the red mist.
- taftster 4y agoJust to ask. Do you think the housing of the turbine would somehow "channel" the wind it collects into the blades? And therefore increase the performance or yield against the size of the blades? Maybe in this way, the comparison is legitimate, that a smaller turbine blade (as in this case) can collect more wind? 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.
- constantcrying 4y ago>bladeless >motionless I always love it when articles are obvious shill pieces for a company. It is a turbine system with a different mechanism of getting air to a turbine. The first thing you see in the video of the article are spinning blades. 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.
- danans 4y ago> The unit requires about 10% of the space required by solar panels and generates round-the-clock energy 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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- yodelshady 4y ago"The unit... generates round-the-clock energy... producing energy in all weather conditions." 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.
- ajross 4y ago> Is there actually a large population out there who has never experienced outside weather conditions in which there was no wind? 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?
- laverya 4y ago> 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. 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-factors https://energynumbers.info/germanys-offshore-wind-capacity-f...
- mensetmanusman 4y agoWouldn’t people do both then?
- dieselgate 4y agoCool article and comment section just to see the tech used here (some folks even linked the patent for this design). It's interesting to see this in "pv" magazine which presumably stands for photo-voltaic. 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
- ltbarcly3 4y agoMoving parts, noise. These are the reasons PV is likely to continue to dominate most deployments.
- Schroedingersat 4y agoMore likely that wind power is the third power of wind speed, and rated capacities are usually 8m/s 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.
- suprjami 4y ago> An Aeromine system typically consists of 20 to 40 units installed on the edge of a building facing the predominant wind direction. I don't want 40 of these highly visible things on the edge of my roof.
- pencilguin 4y agoI bet you wouldn't mind 40 of them on the edge of the nearest Walmart roof.
- hot_gril 4y agoI'm all for renewable energy, but what's up with the push (and subsidization) for homeowners to become mini power plant operators? It's even weirder with home batteries involved. Yeah you save on transmission costs, but it's overall a lot cheaper, safer, and less politically messy to do this at dedicated facilities or huge buildings like malls.
- jeffbee 4y agoIt plays together with other ridiculous myths like urban farming. People want to feel and appear green regardless of objective reality.
- hot_gril 4y agoYeah but at least urban farming isn't super subsidized. If someone wants to play with home solar or farming as a hobby, that's great, but it's not everyone else's job to make sure it's profitable for that person. Maybe the issue with urban farming is that water is subsidized, and those people use a lot of it.
- hot_gril 4y agoAlso, I'm happy at least something is being done. It's just not a great way.
- samatman 4y agoThis things is clearly not designed for residential roofs. 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.
- hot_gril 4y agoThe picture does seem to be in a neighborhood. Can't tell if it's on a house, but either way it's a small building.
- c2h5oh 4y agoI'd like this to be true, but that's some industrial grade BS sprinkled in that press release: > 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.
- concordDance 4y agoWind speed scales with height above ground so I presume these are only for sky scrapers.
- 627467 4y agoSo, does anyone know how I can go about measure the wind potential over a certain períod of time on my - say - balcony or roof? Any inexpensive suggestion?
- pleb_nz 4y agoI don't see think we should see this as a replacement, but something that compliments other forms such as solar. It doesn't have to be one or the other ignoring costs