Groundbreaking 'spinning' wind turbine wins UK Dyson award

[Reiver]

It's a shame no-one seems to make a decent small helical blade Darrieus VAWT ? Not only do they seem to be able to work better on roof top mounts as they can utilise the updraught, but to my mind they look really cool, maybe even beautiful which I can't personally say about normal HAWT's even though they do produce good clean energy.

[SteamyTea]

11 hours ago, Reiver said:

Not only do they seem to be able to work better on roof top mounts as they can utilise the updraught,

But the overall wind speed is still lower for the height compared to if there was no building at all.

11 hours ago, Reiver said:

but to my mind they look really cool, maybe even beautiful

This is what they are sold on, but the performance is rubbish, and always will be.

 

Small (sub 250 kW) wind turbines are generally rubbish, much better to stop mucking about and only install large (>5MW)

A few years ago I counted up all the sub 100 kW turbines in Cornwall and found that they could have been replaced with just one 2 MW one.  It would have produced more energy to.

[Reiver]

I know the efficiency is poor, but I still think there's a place for them if you have  an efficient house and hence demands are low, particularly in the NW where wind is usually much more plentiful than sun. The main stumbling block seems to be reliability at a decent cost.

[Miek]

It's really difficult to design an economical & reliable small turbine, really really difficult. Solar just wins the race. PV has dropped in price so much it's quite astounding. I remember when BP PV panels were about £5/Watt , PV is now about 20p/Watt!