Most of the world’s wind power comes from massive wind farms set atop rolling hills and spread across the ocean just off coastlines. This is because the bigger the turbine, the more power it can generate. So, it’s more efficient.
However, our backyards and some crowded cities are pretty windy too. Why waste the resource? Furthermore, some of these places can’t fit giant wind turbines anywhere and aren’t very sunny, so solar panels aren’t as effective. These areas could benefit from an alternative, smaller wind turbine to harness the natural electricity-generating power blowing through.
With this in mind, American designer and entrepreneur Joe Doucet created a new kind of wind turbine that hides in plain sight as a beautiful kinetic art installation. His creation is a wind turbine wall consisting of 25 columns of square panes that spin along an axis. It looks like a grid of twisting squares. The color and size are customizable.
Doucet said, “There are a lot of reasons why wind farms are in the ocean. First, these are massive towers; you’re not going to see them littered around the cityscape. In urban areas, there’s not a lot of open sunlight for solar to work. The wind is always there.”
The idea is to put this kinetic wind-harvesting installation around town – like a fence around a building or on the side of the highway to block traffic noise – to take advantage of the breeze and reduce our dependence on the electricity grid.
Doucet said, “Instead of the typical retaining walls along roads and freeways, you’d have an array of these. Then, with the added wind boost from trucks, our highways could take care of all our energy needs.”
The structure that houses the turbines is aluminum, so it’s relatively lightweight and easy to install or move around. The turbines drive a small generator. The electricity it produces can be stored in a battery, used directly, or sold to the local electricity grid. Therefore, the wall could serve as a source of income for the owner if they’re not using the electricity.
The wall doesn’t generate as much electricity as a sizeable bladed turbine, but every little bit helps mitigate climate change. The prototype Doucet presents can produce over 10,000 kilowatt-hours annually, which should be enough to power a typical family home.
Doucet has other innovations, too, including luxury jeans with integrated technology and visually pleasing 3D-printed outdoor seating that doubles as public safety bollards. He is very interested in finding exciting and beautiful ways of incorporating technology into everyday life. He aims to make people more comfortable with the speed of change in our modern world and inject fun into life’s humdrum and routine aspects.
You can even make your own wind power wall. YouTuber Robert Murray-Smith explains it all in the video below:
And Doucet isn’t the only person designing smaller, personal-sized wind turbines for homes and urban living. A pair of students won the James Dyson Award in 2018 with the O-Wind Turbine, and a small company in Salt Lake City, Utah, called Halcium, developed the Powerpod.
Halcium claims the Powerpod is the safest and most powerful wind turbine on the planet. It’s designed for residential and urban environments where there isn’t enough space for a massive wind turbine. It’s about the size of a large barrel and can be installed on a building, campervan, sailboat, fence, or any secure surface. Wind can enter from any direction and multiple directions simultaneously. The blade is concealed within the shell, so it’s safe to have around pets, wildlife, and children.
The Powerpod is similar to the O-Wind Turbine because it’s also an omnidirectional wind-harvesting device for crowded city environments. However, the O-Wind Turbine doesn’t involve a blade. Instead, it uses Bernoulli’s principle to spin the entire shell around a central axis. The twisting motion powers a generator that produces electricity.
For sustainable energy to become the norm, it has to become more convenient and affordable so that anyone, anywhere, can set up a system personally. At the moment, it is almost impossible for someone in a big city to generate their own power from their apartment. So, where would the device to harness energy be set up? This is just one of many complications for the city dweller to be green. Finding a solution to this problem inspired the students, Nicolas Orellana and Yaseen Noorani, from Lancaster University, to invent the O-Wind Turbine.
The O-Wind Turbine is cheap to manufacture and easy to set up. It could easily be fixed outside balconies or attached to the side of buildings for small-scale energy production. In addition, it is a simplistic design with no steering involved, requiring less maintenance than traditional wind turbines.
Wind is a popular form of renewable energy for our power supply. However, it’s almost entirely left out of the picture when it comes to other energy-intensive things, like transportation, with a few fascinating exceptions. Nevertheless, some people have experimented with wind-powered vehicles.
For example, Blackbird is a rickety one-seater F1 racer with a giant windmill. Its wheels power a turbine, and the propeller in the “windmill” spins backward, generating thrust. Moving downwind, the propeller spins faster and, therefore, so do the wheels, pushing the car more quickly than the wind speed.
A few other strange car designs involving wind turbines propel the vehicle along, too, but none have made it beyond the conceptual or prototype phase. Nevertheless, wind-powered cars could become one of the carbon-free car choices in the future. Likely, they’ll be hybrids that use electric power as a backup source. Electric vehicles are already well established, and renewable energy has been advancing dramatically in recent years. So, there’s no reason why cars equipped with wind turbines wouldn’t exist someday.
Equally clever in its simplicity, researchers in Norway have found that painting one turbine blade black can reduce bird fatalities by 72%, making existing wind energy infrastructure safer for wildlife. In conclusion, we’re going to need all the sustainable electricity-generating ideas at our disposal to tackle global warming. The more people work on improving ways to harness the small gusts around us, as these inventors and designers have, the easier it could be to survive the climate crisis!
