Wind Power: Are Vertical Axis Turbines Better?
(Page 3 of 5)
February/March 2008
Alison Rogers Interview with Mick Sagrillo
Enter buildings. Why not a building? Think about a flag pole in the city, and the flag is bobbing around and changing directions. If you go out to a school in the country, with wide open spaces, that flag is just straight out. You’re looking at the effect of ground clutter. Trees, buildings — all of that stuff creates turbulence. There are two problems with turbulence. Number one, wind that changes direction and speeds that go up and down translates into a lot of wear and tear on the turbine, which translates into a shorter life. The other thing is, there’s no power in ground-level wind. It’s just chaotic motion. There’s no real energy.
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So the pitch and the rise of a roof wouldn’t accelerate or concentrate the wind’s energy? That’s bogus. That concept works and is actually true when you’re dealing with landforms. When dealing with terrain and topography, you’ve got a very wide, open area, miles around, and you’ve got a ridge that’s perpendicular to the wind. What happens is, when the wind approaches that ridge, it is compressed and the flow actually increases. When you deal with a building, wind goes around and just tumbles over it. They’ve downscaled the idea of topographic fluid dynamics and applied it to buildings. It’s not accurate, which has been very well documented with flow studies. The wind trips over obstacles, and when it trips, the wind can’t do the work it could have done without the obstacle. You’re creating turbulence and diminishing the quality of the wind resource. With wind, we’re dealing with quantity, yes, but we’re also dealing with quality. You want a nice fluid flow, not turbulence.
They seem to be gaining some popularity among consumers. Do they cost less? You know, it doesn’t matter. It’s not about initial cost. It’s about energy production over the 20- to 30-year-life of the turbine. Vertical technology is less efficient — the return on investment in terms of cost per kilowatt hour isn’t as good.
The whole thing is not about spinning. You can buy a pinwheel that spins. It’s really about generating electricity, and doing so reliably over many years. The vertical axis technology has just not been able to survive in the market.
There’s appeal for them in the marketplace because there’s something so visually appealing about a vertical axis turbine. There are actually studies in Europe showing that people are mesmerized by windmills. It’s called the frequency effect. It’s akin to sitting on a shore and watching waves come in, or a campfire, or wind on prairie grasses. The studies show that people are more fascinated by vertical axis turbines than horizontal, for one reason because you don’t see them as frequently, for another reason because verticals don’t have this tail moving around, which can be distracting, depending on how the wind is moving it around. People are fascinated by the technology because it’s very soothing. There are a number of inventers that take advantage of that.
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