Michael Mantion
OMG it looks so stupid.. Is it a Rolls Royce?? Who puts a hood ornament on a building?? Besides Rolls Royce who puts a hood ornament on a car?? lol Oh and there is no way they are making a omni directional 30k windmill for 10k.. sorry not going to happen, maybe 100k..
Michael Mantion
OK read it again, in the end it is a 3m 1500watt for 10k.. I was going to say.. Yes that I believe and now it is significantly over priced..
F M
Brilliant, overpriced idea.
Mike Hallett
Despite their efforts to counter noise, I find it difficult to believe there won\'t be a \"rumble\" resonating through the structure of the building. Nevertheless, very glad to see somebody is putting more effort into shrouded horizontal wind turbines. Perhaps we should be installing them in redundant factory chimneys and cooling towers. Still, no doubt wind power is a passing fad and will eventually be supplanted by more exotic power sources. We can but hope.
David Evans
According to an earlier article listed below, the Windspire vertical axis turbine is already on sale at $5,000 for 1.2 kW. It\'s not clear to me that this new idea is any advance.
Slowburn
It looks good, except that I worry about what happens if you suffer blade damage.
Gijs Priegel
While the post claims that large size units are more efficient (as one would expect), the numbers don\'t add up to that conclusion. a 15m diameter unit gives up to 30kW, while a 4m unit gives 2kW and a 3m 1.5 kW. thats frontal surface area (the only quantity of relevance to wind power) ratios of 25:1.78:1 with power ratios of 20:1.33:1. arguably the 3m diameter one is most efficient. However, it becomes much worse when you take into account the actual size of the structure, which scale to the third power and leads to a relative size ratio of 1:2.37:125. Hence the 15m only has 1/6th the efficiency per volume occupied of the 3m unit. I have assumed the 15m diameter one has, like the two smaller ones, a height equal to the diameter. reducing the height to 2.4m (impossible with this design) would give parity with efficiency per volume. In short, the numbers are probably wrong, and the design suffers from the major flaw that the material volume required scales with the swept volume of the unit. as long as efficiency scales with the frontal surface area, you\'re cost-power output ratio will always get worse with size.
Nicholas Searle
More info here from The New Inventors website http://www.abc.net.au/tv/newinventors/txt/s3203927.htm
Mr T
We\'ve seen so many designs like this, bladed turbines with augmenter of one design or another, they either never get built or the company doesn\'t last long. In short, it\'s a bad idea, all that extra material has to be paid for.
This is a great example of why common sense needs o be taught along with design in technical design classes...
David Storfer
1.2kw for $5,000 or 30 kw for $10,000 - that sounds like a big advance and improvement?
Also, I find it completely plausible that a small 9 foot device wouldn\'t \"resonate a rumble throughout a building. There are large heating and cooling systems running on the tops of buildings that don\'t seem to rumble the building. I work in a 4 story building with 2 such units taller than me and I don\'t feel or hear anything.