> 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.
I 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.
The estimate for cats is widely disputed and was a complete WAG with little empirical backing and more like extrapolation from a non-representative sample. There are studies currently in progress to more accurately measure the impact of cats upon bird populations and last I saw the results were showing the prior estimates were grossly overestimated because cats kill many more kinds of animals than just birds like squirrels, lizards, and rodents.
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.
Domestic cats should be illegal anywhere outside of a major city. It’s such low hanging fruit in reducing loss of small native animals, with virtually no downside.
In my experience, it very much depends on the individual cat. Besides general levels of hunting competence overall, cats seem to have a good bit of variety in their preferred prey types. Some catch everything, but some specialize in small rodents (never catching birds) and others I have know did catch primarily birds. I had one who loved young rabbits above all else, and I've even known some for whom a nice fat moth was the gourmet treat above any.
The exact numbers re: what kills birds here aren't really what matters. What matters is the relative orders of magnitude. Even if the number for cats is a WAG and wildly off by a factor of 2 in either direction, we can safely say that buildings and windows are far more dangerous to birds than Felis catus.
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.
I think part of my point should be taken further that we don’t even have the correct order of magnitude for cats and the numbers for windmills are so small it’s probably negligible although care should be taken to see if there is some disproportionate externalities observable now such as when Australia changed its own ecosystems with changes to farming practices. What isn’t under so much debate though that does unequivocally matter is the amount of land necessary to convert to renewables which is a function of energy density in urban areas where land use is much more expensive and total energy used per area is quite high. While systems do get more efficient over time the efficiency isn’t exponential and portable energy is a big issue that is mostly orthogonal to renewable sources in funding mechanisms yet also part of the incredibly complex energy supply chain of the world economy.
Presumably that’s a 9kWp system, with peak potential on a good day to generate 9kW at the optimal time of the day
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.
There’s websites to calculate it based upon satellite photos of your roof alone (what the installer and system designers did for me along with permitting that would have taken me far too much time / effort). Your panel type, inverter, etc. all matter as well. A meter to determine your electricity usage throughout the year is good to have as well although I didn’t do that before I installed my system and expected to try to size a battery backup system only once I had sufficient data. But basically so far my house is pretty much a dud in terms of ROI for any more modernization efforts without tearing it down basically and this is what I’ve been thinking about a lot more than the usual trend of renewables and such. Old homes in the US are really, really, really hard to retrofit remotely economically and are burdens upon the energy grid and infrastructure throughout the lifetime of the structures. The costs fall disproportionately upon our population that can least afford it as well and subsidies are laughably minuscule and mostly taken by more affluent homeowners in practice.
I'm not sure how to interpret these statistics. Since it's given per 10000 fatalities (and not per square meter covered in said obstacle), can't you conclude that the wind turbine fatalities are so low because we haven't deployed many of them? Whereas there are tons of buildings?
I suppose that if fewer than 1/10000 birds are killed by an X number of wind turbines, then we could guesstimate that fewer than 1/5000 birds will be killed by 2X number of wind turbines in a given area.
Wind power accounts for about 10% of total generation in the US. So even if turbines were added to account for 100% generation, and demand increased 10x, it'd still be far less than anything else on the list.
Surely 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.
Wind power is responsible for something like 5% of generated electricity in the world. If we scale it 1000x, to reach the cat level, we'll have enough electricity to power 50 Earths :)
More like 20 earths. “5% of generated electricity” isn’t “5% of energy use”, by a decent margin.
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”
Yes. In most applications, literally 45-70% of the fossil fuel is burned just to generate waste heat. This is a huge advantage for renewables, where it doesn't matter that you're not capturing all the energy in the wind going past, because it's not being consumed or generating waste.
From what I understand, one of the big bird issues with turbines is that birds of prey like hawks, eagles, and falcons don't generally look forward but down as they scout for prey, and thus are likely to fly into turbine blades. I believe some turbines have cameras systems to detect birds in the vicinity of the blades and either make a noise to alert the bird or maybe even bring the turbine to a halt.
This is really only an issue for large scale installations though, obviously wouldn't apply to low lying roof installations.
The bearded vulture is one of Europe's largest birds, it rarely comes to The Netherlands, living mainly in Spain and France. When it does comes to The Netherlands, about once every 3 years, it'll be a national news item as it's quite a spectacular bird. Last year one came, and not a week later it was found dead under a wind turbine.
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.
Afsluit = "close off". Dijk = "dike" (pronounced the same too). It's a 20 mile long dike we've built that closes off what used to be the South Sea from the North Sea, turning it into a big lake that's called the IJsselmeer.
It's all the QWERTY home-row letters making it look that way, I think. Does look a lot like a quick slam of the fingers on the keyboard to generate a "random" string.
Are you really 100% for wind turbines then?? Is there a way to make them less harmful to birds? Maybe keeping the speed lower? Maybe putting up some more static installations that keep birds away? (Like, say, bright trailers on the fan blades? Is that a real idea?)
Yeah there's research being done on multiple solutions. One of them is painting one of the blades a different color which helps somehow. I don't see how there couldn't be a technical solution, it's not like these turbines are on a tight budget. It could be as complex as having autonomous drones chase away birds if nothing else works.
True. About 50.000 birds die due to windmills per year in The Netherlands, so according to this stat we should have 500M birds. So the odds of it killing a specific bird is roughly 50.000/500M=0.01% chance. So we'd expect it to happen once every 10.000 years. Guess we got unlucky last year..
But the statistics can also be deceiving if presented like that, just like you said if people don’t stop and think about which specific birds they kill.
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.
On this particular vulture (my apologies for looking the way the story is told makes it sound like one of the "They can’t have cows feed under those because it, it causes some kind of birth defects. This is what my sister who has cattle was telling me." ( https://www.marketplace.org/shows/how-we-survive/white-gold/... ))...
> 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.
> 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.
So I don't have to read the article, what is the swept area compared to a conventional wind turbine? My limited understanding is that what really counts.
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 scalable, “motionless” wind energy unit can produce 50% more energy than rooftop solar at the same cost
> 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.
You can see technical drawings of their device in their patent (US 11391262): 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.
> efficiency of 42% of Betz limit, which is inferior to standard utility-scale turbines
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..
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.
There's a difference between thermodynamic efficiency and cost efficiency. Extracting 40% of the energy in the wind for $500 is very often going to be better than extracting 70% for $5000.
Just 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.
That's entirely the point of Aeromine's invention: the foil and body channel the wind (by decreasing air pressure between the foils) and this increases the speed of wind at the turbine. But per my edit, it doesn't seem sufficient to beat the efficiency of traditional wind turbines. I suppose that's why the company tries to focus on other advantage (less noisy, better aesthetics).
If I remember correctly they claim something like 40% of a conventional turbine, so it doesn't beat a conventional turbine in a classic setting however it may work well enough in a residential/light commercial setting.
It really seems like a reverse Dyson bladeless fan.
I could see another advantage for residential use -- you should be able to make the failure mode for this style safer, because you are already wrapping the turbine in metal. It should also be easy to close the channel and stop wind from getting to the blades which is also not possible with traditional designs.
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.
What they're really after is using the structure to direct the wind and create stronger flows by the lip of the roof. This is not a new idea, but perhaps they have hit on a shroud design that works more effectively.
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.
I 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.
But it is not about power per kg of materials but power per $ spent. You may be able to fabricate the wing elements out of cheaper and heavier materials using simpler methods.
I 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.
Scepticism 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.
Hmm, 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?
I can't actually remember the explanation but thinking about it E=1/2mv² but when the air is moving twice as fast the mass of air passing the wind turbine would also double. Sounds plausible at least.
That's exactly the reason why. Kinetic power of each air molecule scales with the square of its speed, and the number of air molecules passing over the wing scales linearly with speed.
But the lazy response is the totally right one. Oh, you have a super simple technology that is 10x better and 10x cheaper than what already exists? And you've been chugging along trying to bring it to market for 5 years and nobody wants to invest? Yeah, everyone else must be stupid or something ...
There are various areas where the wind blows quite a bit and bright, sunny days are not the norm. In those conditions, then maybe it makes total sense to install one of these systems instead of a typical solar rooftop installation.
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.
My conditions are: an area of Illinois a few miles down the road from a wind farm, in a neighborhood with lots of big old trees (which block my roof from the sun for a large portion of the sunny part of the year).
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.
Typically those trees cause the wind to be turbulent, like the dirty air coming off the back of a race car. Normally a wind turbine wants to be mounted high up in the air where the wind is all moving in one direction fairly uniformly. It's unlikely that this technology will naturally overcome that.
Yeah, those are good considerations. I live on Oahu, on the dry side, and when it isn't blaring sunlight, its pretty much 5-15 sustained. Obviously, this a pretty cherry picked example, but its also an important one considering the cost of importing fuel to this island.
I mean, we have batteries. Having enough storage to get through the night is basically solved.
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.
Hydrogen...? Gonna have to live real energy-cheap though. Not much heating/cooling, good insulation, less bathwater, less appliance use, as little driving as possible. Honestly relieved that computer and internet use is lower on the list, but eventually that too.
I don't think the comparison with solar is particularly useful and would always need to be made on a site by site basis. But it is true that some sites have better wind resource than solar. A better comparison is with the limitations of traditional turbines.
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.
I think there needs to be a hybrid system for some redundancy when there's no sun or no wind, of course then maybe we need a water feature so we can have hydro when there's no sun and no wind..hehe.
On a semi-serious note, you use surplus renewable energy to pump water up to a higher elevation and then use that when you need it. The energy storage capacity of pumped hydro can be very impressive.
> 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.
Pumped Hydro is great, but there are only a few places where its cost effective to implement. They are trying to put two in Southern Oregon [0] [1]. They have been looking at it for decades, and still need many more years to look at environmental costs, diverting existing water (especially since that area has been in a large drought for the last few years, and farmers in that basin have had wells running dry), etc.
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
> "there are only a few places where its cost effective to implement"
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.
> 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.
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.
("Dyke" is a wholly different noun. I advise against its use until you understand it better.)
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.
> "Dyke" is a wholly different noun. I advise against its use until you understand it better.
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.
There are always constraints. But technology for building roads adequate for transporting heavy machinery, and for building hilltop reservoirs using it, is extremely mature.
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.
It's doubtful anyone genuinely believed that an offensive term for a lesbian was the most appropriate parsing of that sentence. It's just a bad faith argument and I'm you understand that.
These pumped storage plants are great. However, just like standard hydroelectric plants, they do not scale easily. You cannot build them just about anywhere, you need rather specific conditions, like suitable topography or availability of water. These won’t suffice for our storage needs.
> However, just like standard hydroelectric plants, they do not scale easily. You cannot build them just about anywhere, you need rather specific conditions, like suitable topography or availability of water
So if you add some PV panels and wind turbines around it, it's just like a nuclear reactor but cheaper?
This is often repeated, because it is true. Just asserting it is false with no evidence is not very convincing.
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?
It would be obviously foolish to build out storage before there is enough renewable generating capacity to charge it from. Until then, money is correctly spent on renewable generating capacity that actually displaces CO2 emission.
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.
I have told you where you may send my winnings, in advance, although I cannot enforce it.
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.
Hydro reservoirs seem to cost in the $50-90/kWh range. I don't see that going down as digging and pouring concrete are pretty cost optimized already.
Although a holes don't tend to wear out and can be used many more times than a battery, I'm not convinced low cost abundant-material battery options won't eat their lunch if we keep dragging our feet on the renewable buildout.
I guess if we were really committed to the idea we could use all that Uranium to make some very cheap holes and have it actually contribute to zero carbon energy rather than being a myth, but I'm not convinced the fallout is worth it.
Pumped hydro reservoirs do not, as a rule, require concrete, or overmuch digging, unlike your typical hydro generation dam, which people seem often confuse them with. (But as with most things, you can spend as much as you like, and some have.)
It is wholly possible that, in the fullness of time, some battery chemistry will undercut pumped hydro.
The main problem with chemical batteries is that the cost is linear with capacity, where pumped hydro cost tends to per square root of marginal capacity (for dike construction), but also costs per watt for the turbine-and-pump(s), with a fixed up-front cost for the penstock.
Have you got some examples of reservoirs in the 10s or 100s of GWh range in non-preexisting hydro projects that beat $50/kWh? If not then asserting that costs scale with the square root of capacity is a massive indictment rather than an argument for it.
The square-root scaling law means quadrupling the water storage only doubles the length of the perimeter dike. It is a good thing.
Dikes are as mature as any technology still in use: they predate writing. We don't need to guess what they cost. We have, similarly, well beyond a century of experience with penstocks and kinetic waterwheels. Pumps have been in use for some time, too.
> The square-root scaling law means quadrupling the water storage only doubles the length of the perimeter dike. It is a good thing.
Only if there is a project of reasonable size that has a manageable cost. Otherwise the corolloray that smaller dikes cost more implies that only a small handful of perfectly placed megaprojects will work. Responding with vague rhetoric for something you claim will work when there are hard numbers for finished projects using other technologies makes you look no better than the fission shills.
Snowy 2 blows fission out of the water, even being over budget by the usual fission ratio. But it had a watershed and it wasn't greenfield.
Are there any actually existing off river PHEL projects (or adequately sized reservoirs) with real budgets that actually got finished to compare?
California, in particular, has a century of experience with alpine reservoirs, penstocks, and kinetic water wheel generation; and have recently retrofitted pumping.
A century ago they built earthen dams up there using earth-moving equipment with parts operated by cables on pulleys, because hydraulics were not mature. The roads are still used today, mainly for recreation, and are execrable, but sufficed.
This is more vague hand waving. But it did at least lead to an (unfinished) project with a budget.
Eagle mountain is a brown field off river PHES project. Is it fair to say brown field projects are no more expensive than green?
It has 430m of head which is a fairly good site and a grade of about 30% which is excellent (so cost of power is minimized). Most cost grade A sites should be worse than this.
Cost: $2.5bn
Power: 1.3GW
Capacity: 18GWh or 14hr
Cost $138/kWh
Assuming half is the power infrastructure then cost of capacity is about $70/MWh. The long term cost of a hole is about as close to zero as you want, but O&M costs $10 to a few tens of $ per MWh for existing hydro so there is no reason to think O&M would be cheaper than replacing a >5000-8000 cycle cell if it could match up front costs.
Compare to $200/kWh for current commercial iron/iron flow or historic lows of lithium (which should be indicative of an upper bound on sodium ion as the manufacturing is similar). CATL and Natron are claiming around $60-90/kWh is achievable for SIB by 2030, and Form energy (less believable but still probable) are claiming an eventual lower bound for Fe-air of $20-50.
Seems fair to say raw cost per kWh should favour chemical batteries in many areas by 2030 and LCOS should be on par in 2050s. Cost of power already favours batteries and colocation should favour them further by reducing transmission costs and curtailment. Batteries (except for iron-air) are also faster and more flexible which is why they are replacing gas peakers.
Then there are electrolysers which have a high cost per use and per power but vastly lower (effectively free) cost of capacity.
Seems like fairly strong evidence that PHES is a poor fit in most areas unless it's huge or started right now. Can you find a better example (ideally one which is finished)?
And that paper looks extremely fishy. You can see they tested with 10m/s and 15m/s. I definitely wouldn't want to live at place with average speeds like that. Then you need the wind to blow at a very specific angle of 10-15.
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.
> Then you need the wind to blow at a very specific angle of 10-15.
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.
I maintain that the power of an intermittent generator should be considered in terms of watt-hours per year. Which is of course just watts, but collapsing the time terms obscures that it's a mean value, which the Whr/yr refuses to do.
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.
Not to negate anything mentioned in the sibling comment, but yes. A home solar installation in Australia is about AUD$1.5 per watt for a complete system (panels, inverter, cabling, installation, sign off, etc) before subsidies.
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.
"They" should be the author of this article who chose the headline but failed to back up the claim in the story. If you are going to say that anything is 50% better, then at least show one instance where that was actually achieved. If you invent a new engine that you claim gets 50% better gas mileage, then you better show at least one trip of a significant distance where it did it.
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.
According to the article, Aeromine is the company making the claim that the design can produce 50% more energy. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect them to validate that claim.
I'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.
Well, 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?
The 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.
The 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.
"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.
> 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?
> 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.
You didn't provide a cite, FWIW. But taking the numbers as given:
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.
So you are comparing "any one gas plant", the output of which can be fully controlled, with "whole-grid measurement" for wind? As a whole grid, wind generation capacity is mostly dependent on wind, and not on demand. While gas is used usually for those cases where such power as wind does not cut it. I dont see how you can compare the two. A gasplant CAN produce 100% output if we wish, wind cannot. You can of course compensate somewhat by building out several times the capacity you need in extremely disperse geographic locations (>1000 miles distance between each farm). Could be done, but not sure how its gonna impact the climate change (those farms need to be built and require continuous maintenance).
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...
The source I linked has data for a few other countries, and crucially has "whole-grid" wind measurements for the UK. And the UK never went to 0 for a whole 30 minute reporting period! 99th percentile was under 2% of rated output, though.
> 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)
It means round-the-clock as in "it works during the day and night", rather than literally non-stop. For example, if I said that security did "round the clock patrols", you wouldn't assume they patrol every second of they day, but rather regularly through the night.
The fact a few people might misinterpret it is a marketing bonus, but surely negligable, because no one could believe that.
It's too late for me in my time to pull my thoughts together, but this goes on the same lane as Nigerian prince scams, cryptocurrency/ICO scams, etc.
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.
I love the inherent contradiction of the existence of HOAs. Americans love freedom and small government so much, they have to invent a worse and more invasive replacement.
It's absurd. People are forced into them if they want to buy a house, and part of the agreement is if you sell the house, you can only sell it to a person that agrees to sign. It _should_ be illegal, especially given the racist history that HOAs were designed for.
Neither of the two real estate agents I've worked with batted an eye when I asked to exclude any property subject to 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.
I've lived most of my life in houses not subject to an HOA, but for the past four years I've been "under the thumb" of one. Anecdotally, I notice startlingly little difference between the two regimes. I suppose if someone wants to park a wheelless rusty pickup truck in the middle of their lawn the HOA would do something about it, but that sort of thing was never really an issue.
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.
Valuable things my HOA does: pools, parks, negotiated bulk internet, neighbors keep their lawn mowed and low weeds, no junk cars in the yard type stuff, no unsightly house colors, no serious disrepair of homes, no cars parked on the side of the road because 10 people live in a 3/2.
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.
I don't feel that way. I will go this far. The negative emotion from having to swap out plants because they are technically not shrubs is far worse than the positive emotion I get from having nice parks and neighbors who have nice grass.
I get that, HOAs wouldn’t survive without people like you, I think the US wouldn’t be what it is either. The feeling I get from having all so manicured is like I’m living in a fake world with no creativity, where everything is made of the same cookie cutter, where a small group dictates minuscule details like what blinds you can have or what plants. It feels very oppressive and constricting to me.
Not that it matters, but just for conversation's sake I value my HOA primarily for property value reasons. Once my kids are out of school and I don't care about things like school zones or parks I will be moving to more rural areas without an HOA for similar reasons to why you dislike HOAs so much.
It’s odd that in my area non HOA areas have grown in price more than the gated cookie cutter communities. The people with money want out of there and live by the river and be able to have block parties with cookouts without having to be backed by a change.org petition and petty meetings.
But I’ve also seen that in some areas all you have is HOAs because nothing was developed before those communities and whatever is outside can be pretty crappy.
I think the main issue is that hall monitor types are attracted to the power, and so if a HOA gets taken over by people who like judging others without any other major obligations, they lose sight of the reason for the HOA rules and enforce to the letter of the rules rather than the spirit.
> People are forced into them if they want to buy a house
“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.
> 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.
This shitty analogy assumes that nobody wants HOAs. I personally hate them growing up in the west but a huge chunk of the population thinks they are as important to a neighborhood as having good schools, garbage service, etc.
There is no transparency nor accountability for the "condo commandos" who rule some HOA boards like the girls in Mean Girls. I've ended up on 2 separate condo boards and each time I swear "never again!". Maybe this time I mean it.
HOAs were originally "White Homeowners' Associations," so after (and likely before) losing their legal purpose of being entities that enforced the racial covenants that restricted their members from selling their homes to black and Jewish people, their purpose instead became to enforce a particular kind of cultural whiteness on the neighborhood. Whites who didn't take care of their lawns or wanted to paint their houses the wrong color weren't being white well enough.
> 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 perk of HOAs is that you can get elected to it. You can organize your neighborhood to get elected and make changes if they aren’t happy with the way it’s currently run.
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.
HOAs are much better, not worse replacement. If I don’t like HOA rules, I have more ability to affect these than to affect county, state or federal level rules. I can also vote with my feet by moving out of HOA, to a different HOA or even to a place with no HOA. Moving out of county, state or country has significant higher cost, which is higher the bigger the administrative unit is. In short, for any given problem with HOA, municipal/state/federal government has the same problem, and in fact it’s worse there.
It's a small, local government run by people who actually live in the area they are governing. It's objectively better than a large, non-local government that has no skin in the game and doesn't have to live with the consequences of their actions.
> It's a small, local government run by people who actually live in the area they are governing.
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 :).)
It's worse. They're not bored. They're very much enjoying the politicking. And some of them are even in this with good, selfless intentions - but it doesn't change the fact that full-time politicians are not representative of the rest of the population, that has jobs to work, lectures to attend, children to rear, and countless other things to do.
That's not entirely true, my municipal government has skin in the game because taxes are based on property values here. So for example, I know someone who had the bricks redone on his house and when he got the permit to do the renovation, it stipulated that the surface area of brick afterwards was to be equal or greater than before. I suppose it is because brick has higher value than vinyl siding.
They similarly hate ham radio antennas, but there are federal laws that mean you can do it anyway and they can pound sand. Something similar could be put in place for solar/wind installations.
I have seen conflicting claims about ham antennas.
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.
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.
Usually 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.
curb 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
In 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.
That article is pretty clear that it’s only protected via solar access laws in some states, and even in many of those states while they sometimes can’t specifically prohibit panels they can make them basically impossible to find placement for with rules about what can go In outdoor spaces, requiring permission and permits, etc.
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.
I 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.
When I lived in Denver, our data center would sometimes have HVAC trouble because cottonwood tree seeds would clog up the fins of the roof-top heat exchangers. They look like white fluff and some years would cover lawns looking like a light dusting of snow. The worst year, the fins were covered (on one side) with a solid white felt that clogged the fins enough to cause the HVAC to blow circuit breakers and shut down our data center (which was mostly a DR site for other branches of the corporation).
Where 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?
I'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.
To 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.
I mean, solar panels degrade with time. I've heard "30 years" bandied about, but I've also heard that a lot of Chinese-manufactured solar panels rated for 30 years only last 5-10 years (that may have been specific to Australia, I don't recall).
Chinese-made monocrystalline silicon panels are expected to have extremely long lifetimes (25+ years with no degradation) relative to thin film types (Cd-Te, etc.) However, another main issue is quality encapsulation of the panels; if done shoddily this greatly shortens the lifetime of the panels. Practically, look for manufacturers who have the longest guarantees.
Panels laid out in deserts accumulate dust that can cut production by 50%.
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.
Impact of not cleaning is minimal. Maybe 10% at worst. There’s been multiple studies that show the cost of cleaning is greater than improved efficiency for home owners.
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.
I'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.
> 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.
Judging by the 30 second clip they show it's motionless in the same sense as dyson's fans are bladeless. The motion and blades are less in-your-face, but still present.
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)
From 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?
The 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.
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.
Flat 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.
I'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.
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?
I’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.
Wait 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.
There’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.
I 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
I'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.
Yeah 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.
This 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.
I'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.
In 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…
Who 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?
Not 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.
I 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.
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'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.
> 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.
At 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.
> 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.
I 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.
Wonder 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
So, 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?
More 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.
>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.
Cool 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
I'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.
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):
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.