Wind Turbines With No Blades

An anonymous reader writes: Wired has a profile of Spanish company Vortex Bladeless and their unusual new wind turbine tech. "Their idea is the Vortex, a bladeless wind turbine that looks like a giant rolled joint shooting into the sky. The Vortex has the same goals as conventional wind turbines: To turn breezes into kinetic energy that can be used as electricity." Instead of relying on wind to push a propeller in a circular motion, these turbines rely on vorticity — how wind can strike an object in a particular way to generate spinning vortices of air. Engineers usually try to avoid this — it's what brought down the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. But this Spanish company designed the turbine computationally to have the vortices occur at the same time along its entire height. "In its current prototype, the elongated cone is made from a composite of fiberglass and carbon fiber, which allows the mast to vibrate as much as possible (an increase in mass reduces natural frequency). At the base of the cone are two rings of repelling magnets, which act as a sort of nonelectrical motor. When the cone oscillates one way, the repelling magnets pull it in the other direction, like a slight nudge to boost the mast's movement regardless of wind speed. This kinetic energy is then converted into electricity via an alternator that multiplies the frequency of the mast's oscillation to improve the energy-gathering efficiency."

Comments

Cats vs windmills

[sjbe]

Yes, but the majority of those cats eat the birds. I haven't seen a windmill that can do that.

Even if it were true that the cats eat the birds (and I'm not convinced that it is) why is that relevant? They aren't (usually) hunting birds out of actual need to eat and the bird is just as dead regardless of what happens to it later.

I wonder if windmill ground bird compost will be acceptable for organic farms. If so, it sounds like a win-win.

Perhaps you haven't looked at windmills up close recently but there isn't exactly a pile of dead birds sitting below them. Windmills are not a particularly severe danger to our avian friends.

Re:If it works

[Prune]

Cats kill at least an order of magnitude more birds than windmills do. [implication: it's not worth worrying about wind turbines killing birds]

Almost every time bird-killing wind turbines are discussed, someone posts this non-argument.

Let's apply well-known Slashdot troll NatasRevol's logic to other things:
- Heart disease kills at least an order of magnitude more people than diabetes. [implication: it's not worth worrying about diabetes killing people]
- Windows runs on at least an order of magnitude more personal desktops than Linux. [implication: it's not worth being concerned about the Linux desktop experience]
- Slashdot user BarbaraHudson posts at least an order of magnitude more troll posts than NatasRevol. [implication: it's not worth being annoyed at NatasRevol shitposting]

And then there's this: how many eagles and other large threatened and endangered birds are cats killing?

Federal Court Rules Massive Wind Energy Project in Violation of Endangered Species Act

Advantages?

[Dereck1701]

So they're not half as efficient as turbines, meaning you need more than twice as many of them to produce the same power, but they "should" be quite a bit cheaper than turbines due to their simplicity. At best it sounds like they're a draw with current methods, at worst they're a step back. About the only real advantage seems to be that they may prevent the few birds/bats kills by turbines from taking place and may help quell SOME of the NIMBY complaints (noise, blade shadows).

Re:If it works

[weilawei]

Mine too, and he gets rewarded for it. When he first brought one home, he came up to the door, and waited for me to open it and showed me the mouse. I told him that he was a good boy and he promptly pounced on it and devoured it.

If you think your cat is acting weird (not you, PopeRatzo, just in general), it's probably you that needs adjustment. Cats are remarkably clear about what they want and what makes them happy or displeases them.

Problems

[DrYak]

But if a few hundred California condors die to windmills, then we have serious problems.

Yes you'll have *a* serious problem. But this problem isn't specifically the wind mills.
The problem is the whole range of human activities that drove their population down to the point that a hundred of dying condors is significant.
(I suspect, mainly massive changes in their natural habitat, big disruption of the ecological equilibrium, esp. in regards of the prey they usually feed on. Probably environmental pollution. Maybe a little bit of hunting too.)
Banning windmills is only a surface problem. The few condors that might die because of them probably won't. But it doesn't solve the actual main big problem that condors are endangered.
Protected wildlife reservation might help more, for example.