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New vertical axis wind turbine design – Windpower’s Aerogenerator
By MB-BigB | January 30, 2008
The picture doesn’t give a good sense of the size of this thing, but the new Aerogenerator vertical axis turbine being designed by Windpower is 144 meters high, and would generate up to 9 megawatts of wind power electricity. According to an article in the Guardian, the Aerogenerator would generate nearly 3 times the amount of electricity as a conventional wind turbine of about the same size. Theo Bird, the founder of Windpower, says that the use of this design would mean that Britain could meet its wind power generation targets with thousands of fewer turbines.
While vertical axis wind turbines have been around for awhile, they haven’t gained much traction – one of the reasons is that with a normal vertical axis design the turbine becomes unstable over a certain height. The Windpower Aerogenerator gets around that problem since the center of gravity is close to the bottom of the turbine.
Right now Windpower is thinking smaller than these giant 9 megawatt vertical designs. They expect to have a 30 meter high “community scale” 50 kW version of the Aerogenerator available within two years. Unfortunately, the biggie version of the Aerogenerator will have to wait – Mr. Bird doesn’t think the 9MW version can be ready until 2013.
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Update: 17 Dec 2009
I missed this story when it came out in Aug 2009. A project team led by Wind Power Ltd (the designer of the Aerogenerator) has been given the go ahead to plan for building 1 gigawatt of what’s being called novel offshore vertical axis (NOVA) turbines by 2014. The plan is calling for either 200 5 megawatt Aerogenerators, or a smaller number of larger versions of the same design. An installed 5 kilowatt version of the Aerogenerator is currently undergoing testing at Cranfield University, and indications are that the design of the Aerogenerator is sound.
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- Best of both worlds: The Bluenergy vertical SolarWind Turbine
- How ‘Drafting’ can help wind turbine efficiency
- Green Energy News: Reinventing the Wind Turbine
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Topics: Wind power | 2 Comments »
2 Responses to “New vertical axis wind turbine design – Windpower’s Aerogenerator”
Comments
March 5th, 2008 at 9:00 pm
[...] site. Vertical axis turbines have been in news lately, from the Bluenergy SolarWind Turbine, to the Aerogenerator, to Mariah Power’s new Windspire, which is about to start one year of rigorous performance [...]
March 19th, 2008 at 2:53 am
Wow its a fairly stunning turbine i hope it gets put on the market soon!