Wind Power – 1st Entry into the Wild Energy Challenge – Please Cast Your Vote
This is an entry into the Adult section of Wild Energy. If you like this entry please give it a rating out of five stars (see the bottom of this page).
A personal wind turbine aimed at providing the best possible experience of generating power from wind in your backyard. The project was formed around technical product innovation, and will be enhanced by innovation in our approach to business.
Our idea is useful because:
Personal wind turbines have an important potential to deliver renewably generated power to houses in the developed world, and villages in the developing countries. They offer a tantalizing opportunity as part of a mix of energy appliances for the future ‘zero energy’ home.
At the moment they are generally:
- o Too noisy
o Too prone to damage in high winds
o Too unreliable
o Poorly suited to turbulent ‘domestic’ wind
o Too industrially ugly
o Require too much knowledge and intervention
o Too heavy, hard to install, hard to service
o Not made with processes and volumes to achieve economic scale
Our design addresses these issues with an advanced teetering single blade rotor that is quiet, protected by completely furling the blade in extreme winds, uses novel electronic feedback and a light rotor to follow gusty wind well, and is styled to be an aesthetic complement to a house.
It gives good performance feedback via a laptop or 3G phone.
It is a light machine, easily installed by two people and able to be installed by one.
It is designed to be made with both low and high volume processes, and could be very cheap to manufacture at high volume.
Our idea is better than the alternatives because:
It is designed from first principles to be a wind powered home energy appliance. The control method is unique, the high wind protection is unique and the complete package of product technology and business approach will give a better experience of owning or hosting a personal wind turbine.
The major pain or problem solved by our idea is:
Residential customers for a personal wind turbine need an appliance-like product that is quiet, reliable and long lived, designed to extract energy from turbulent wind, and aesthetically complementary to the house setting. Our product will provide an outstanding experience on these measures and help develop a mass market for domestic scale wind turbines.
The market for our idea is:
People in the developed world living on sections bigger than 0.4 Ha with an average wind speed 4.5 m/s or better.
Light industrial loads (farm applications, SCADA applications, and telecommunication sites) particularly where grid power is not available.
In the developing world, villages or rural households (or their aid agencies) not served by grid connections, with a similar wind regime.
Our Solution to provide 50% of the Mokihinui Output:
To achieve an annual output of half of 335 GWh we would need to sell and install approximately 34,000 turbines in New Zealand, which could quite feasibly be done. The report ‘Get Smart – Think Small’ by the office of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment estimates that in the long term 36,731 turbines of our size could be installed in New Zealand.
There are also 140,000 lifestyle blocks in New Zealand and more than 100,000 farm households, many of which are in wind zones suitable for using a domestic scale wind turbine.
The long run cost of 34,000 turbines would be approximately $470M.
Links:
Company website: Powerhouse Wind
http://www.passiton.co.nz/Discover/Business-and-Innovation/thinair-video/ ‘pass it on’ youtube video
This is an entry into the Adult section of Wild Energy. If you like this entry please give it a rating out of five stars below
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I really like the way this design can be used by households to generate their own electricity as well as on a bigger scale. I think it’s really important that we look at ways to not only minimise our impact on the environment, but become more self sufficient in our own homes. Awesome concept!
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Generating power close to the end user doesn’t need the national grid or suffer all of it’s loses, therefore less turbines are required compared to a centrally located hydro dam.
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