Okay, why didn’t I think of that uh? Well okay, I’m no engineer, but you have to admit it’s a pretty clever idea. Essentially, based on the fact that traditional wind turbines only use a fragment of the potential energy that the wind carries (the video says 50% but I’m sure I’ve read that 35% was the best you could get from off-shore turbines which use larger blades) by dissipating the wind, the jet engine technology concentrates the wind in two combined flows to increase the amount of energy produced. This means their efficiency, compared to traditional turbines is increased three to four-fold.
Check the video after the jump:
This looks like a design idea for a prototype, but here’s the good news. The company behind the design, FloDesign, originally an R&D firm, has been granted $8.3 million by the US Department of Energy to commercialise their prototype. This added to a series of high profile investments mean the company now has $34.5 Million to begin commercial development. In other words, a wind of change is coming on the renewable energy market (umm… ;))
To me this is tremendously exciting. I’m a huge believer in the potential that wind has to clean up the grid off coal, and other dirty sources. Sure they’re not quite as elegant and the traditional wind turbines but efficiency is the key here and they have a lot in their favour:
- produces twice as much power
- requires less land as turbines need not be so far apart
- easier to transport
- work with both slower and faster winds than traditional turbines
- automatically aligns to the direction of the wind without needing a motor
The only thing they don’t mention is noise but I guess we’ll have to wait until the prototypes are built to find out. I won’t make the mistake of comparing the noise that a plane’s jet engine makes as this is caused for the most part by the combustion engine in it that heats up the air to provide propulsion. However, when wind gets trapped in buildings causing draughts and so on, it usually makes quite a bit of noise… but then again it’s probably negligible on this device.
Imagine just how much more power these could produce! Last year Spain reported having peaked their wind energy production at just over 50% of the total grid output. With a system like this in place, they could easily reach 100% in fortuitous days.
The smart grid is coming… hopefully.
[Seen on TreeHugger]Edit: I’ve replaced the video as the original one had been removed by the user. Thankfully, YouTube often has at least 2 copies of every video