Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Living Inside A Giant Wind Turbine

Posted by Hemos on from the new-and-interesting-ideas dept.

A reader writes: "New Scientist has an article about buildings that incorporate numerous wind turbines. These neat office blocks can generate much of the own energy and the design of the building actually makes them more power efficient that regular turbines."

3 of 246 comments (clear)

  1. What about high winds? by BillyGoatThree · · Score: 4, Interesting

    What happens during tornado/hurricane/santa-ana-style winds? Sure, they can turn the props off (although won't they break?) but what about the shape of the building "focussing" the wind down near the ground?

    --
    324006
  2. what about energy from heat rising? by NeMon'ess · · Score: 5, Interesting
    In nearly every multistory building today, ventilator systems have to keep the higher floors from getting too warm because heat rises. A system should be designed to take the warm air from all the floors and pass it through turbines before it exits the roof. I'm sure it would not be as efficient as what this article suggests, placing turbines into the exterior of the structure, but it would save some electricity costs.

    As far as this article is concerned, I don't see this design going into the replacement for the WTC. Buildings today are carefully designed to obstruct as little wind as possible. Having giant turbines between two buildings over an avenue would place massive forces on the buildings. It's hard enough designing skyscrapers, I doubt the designers are keen to add extra force to compensate for.

  3. Bad analogy by BeBoxer · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Really, conservation of energy supports the idea of the turbine cooling the building. Or at least the air passing thru the turbine. The turbine is outputting energy in the form of electricity. Where did that energy come from? Primarily the kinetic energy of the wind. Since heat is pretty much a specialized type of kinetic energy, it's not hard to imagine that the turbine would extract some amount of heat from the air.

    I'm not an expert in the field, and I can imagine the opposite happening too. The turbine would take kinetic energy out of the air and convert it to both heat in the air and energy in the turbine. But neither case would violate the conservation of energy.