Living Inside A Giant Wind Turbine

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."

Comments

what about energy from heat rising?

[NeMon'ess]

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.