Vertical Axis Wind Turbine With Push and Pull

Sterling D. Allan writes "After 10 years of prototyping, wind tunnel testing, patenting, and tweaking, Ron Taylor of Cheyenne (windy) Wyoming is ready to take his vertical axis wind turbine into commercial production. Design creates pull on the back side contributing to 40%+ wind conversion efficiencies. Because it spins at wind speed, it doesn't kill birds, and it runs more quietly. It also doesn't need to be installed as high, and it can withstand significantly higher winds (can generate in winds up to 70 mph, compared to ~54 mph tops for propeller designs). Generating costs estimated at 2.5 cents per kilowatt-hour, putting it in the lead pocket-book-wise not just of wind and solar, but of conventional power as well. Production prototype completion expected in 5-7 months."

Comments

Let's get this all out of the way at once

[lheal]

No, this guy is not full of hot air. He's not all bluster.

The technology does blow everything else away.

Yes, it will succeed, and not just in vertical markets.

It really took some gust to work on this.
----

Now I have to go back to bed in a fit of self-loathing.

Uses up the wind

[backslashdot]

Yes, and even worse, it uses up the wind.

Re:Uses up the wind

[superbondbond]

Sometimes I wish that were true.

As I live in Wyoming, we have plenty of wind to spare.

Please take some.

Re:Doesn't kill birds?

[slamkoder]

Is it really an advantage that it doesn't kill birds in these H5N1 times?

This is a serious issue...

[mdielmann]

Wind farms do less damage to the environment than any other form of power generation other than solar, and kill fewer birds than the windowed office building that would be built to house the adiminstration for any form of power plant.

This is a serious issue and needs to be addressed! How did solar power get away with causing so little damage?? I propose that all solar arrays be built slightly concave, and reflect most of the light they don't absorb (we don't want to reduce efficiency), creating giant death rays. This way we can ignite birds that fly through the kill zone and correct this serious deficiency.

In an unrelated issue, I'd also like some serious effort to be put into breeding chickens that can fly.

Birds are the tip of the iceberg

[Dr. Cody]

When I was in the Netherlands last year, I toured a large wind park north of Groningen. There, under the turbines, I saw a total of:

1 dead bird
1 dead sheep

From this, we can deduce that wind turbines are equally as deadly to sheep as they are to birds. The 800-1300 sheep killed annually must make the Altamont Pass a bloodbath of truely horrific proportions.

But seriously, folks...

The Altamont Pass is a disaster which was produced by irresponsible economic incentives of the time which put up low quality turbines willy-nilly throughout California. Add to that the fact that many of Altamont Pass's are placed on angle-iron framework towers. These make them ideal nesting grounds--well, if one ignores the 30 m food processor out front. Modern towers take great care in leaving no place for avian habitation.

This park's would otherwise be just a regional problem, but, thanks to more animal-focused environmental groups, and the tabloids who eat up their press releases, that wind park is biting us over here in Europe in the ass.

Altamont Pass is, however, the only wind park on earth with this level of environmental impact. Nothing comes close in these regards. A substantially larger off-shore wind park off the coast of Denmark (Knoetby, I think) actually showed that the birds weren't scared off, but instead kept a distance of about 150 m from the equipment.

Re:Birds are the tip of the iceberg

[Chris Burke]

There, under the turbines, I saw a total of:

1 dead bird
1 dead sheep

Where they near each other? I see two possibilities:
1) Bird gets smacked by turbine blade beak-first into sheep's temple, killing it. The solution to this problem would be to sharpen the blades, so instead of striking the bird like a baseball it would cut them in half so the two halves would fall at normal speed to the ground.
2) The sheep, being of a species well known for their craven cowardice and deep cunning (they only act stupid so as not to appear threatening), saw the dead bird, and upon considering the environmental implications, died of a heart attack. The solution to this problem is to give sheep internet access so they can research the problem themselves.

The Altamont Pass is a disaster which was produced by irresponsible economic incentives of the time which put up low quality turbines willy-nilly throughout California. Add to that the fact that many of Altamont Pass's are placed on angle-iron framework towers. These make them ideal nesting grounds--well, if one ignores the 30 m food processor out front. Modern towers take great care in leaving no place for avian habitation.

Just for everyone's convenience, here's a link to a page which shows the old-style tower and the new style and the obvious difference it would make in problems with perching and nesting. There's also the non-obvious scale difference, with the new larger one being much safer due to slower and thus easier to see/avoid blades. It also has per-turbine death rates for birds for various sites, with Altamont being much higher in raptor deaths than the others.