Wind Turbines on Garage

Windy City Wind Turbine Greenway Parking Garage's wind turbine system, viewed from below. via Fast Company

Chicago was nicknamed the Windy City because of its blowhard politicians, not the powerful gusts off Lake Michigan. But a new parking garage took the name to heart regardless and installed this amazing helix-shaped wind turbine system inside the building, making urban turbines not only cool, but functional.
This summer, 12 turbines started spinning at Greenway Self-Park, which bills itself, somewhat oxymoronically, as Chicago's first Earth-friendly parking garage.

Open-screen walls on the 11-story garage provide ventilation and reveal the cars inside, but also let passersby marvel at the turbines. The garage also has a cistern rain-collection system, sustainable building materials, a recycling program and an electric car charging station.Lobbies on each floor include information about how to live more sustainably, and the garage has energy-efficient lighting. The garage is pursuing pursuing LEED certification from the U.S. Green Building Council. It even has a reversible meter that can measure and return power to Chicago's grid throughout the year.
Architect Todd Halamka, director of design at the Chicago office of HOK, tells Fast Company he wanted to celebrate the building's function, not hide it.
One wonders how green a parking garage can really be, but it's not like cars are going away anytime soon, so garages might as well aim to ameliorate their impact.
And at the very least, it adds to the architecturally interesting experience of parking in downtown Chicago -- you can go underneath trains, curl up through Marina City, and now this.

Urban Wind Turbines:  via Fast Company

Eddy GT Wind Turbine Is Sleek, Silent and Designed for the City

by Cameron Scott

If you launch a clean energy business in Manhattan it’s almost a given you’ll be inspired to start designing products specifically for the urban environment. Urban Green Energy has just launched a new, one-kilowatt wind turbine designed specifically for city rooftop use! A machine certainly made for the modern dweller, the near silent Eddy GT turbine is a chic piece of wind technology that rotates on a vertical axis, optimizing wind capture, even as the air stream shifts within the dynamic city landscape.

The Eddy GT takes up just 40 square feet to generate its kilowatt — to get that much juice from a solar array, you would need up to 400 square feet, which is a tough sell in major cities like New York and San Francisco. While not a light investment at $7,000 per turbine, Urban Green Energy CEO Nick Blitterswyk estimates that in California, which offers a rebate, you could break even in 10 years, and without the $3,000 rebate, it could take 20 years.
If you’re in San Francisco, look for some turbines in action atop Blitterswyk’s company, amongst other products like the Sanya Solar- and Wind-Powered Streetlamp, in front of Civc Center come mid-October. The turbines have scored some other less predictable placements as well, including a position atop the National Guard building in Cleveland, Ohio, and just about every house in a new middle-class subdivision outside St. Louis!

 

Sleek Solar and Wind Powered Hybrid Street Lamps

by Bridgette Meinhold

As designers strive to create a more sustainable future, we’re thrilled to see designs that integrate a variety of renewable energy technologies into objects we encounter in everyday life. This innovative hybrid wind and solar powered street lamp is just such a solution – not only does it use renewable energy to provide light, it’s a stylish update to an everyday object that is capable of operating completely off-grid. The hybrid streetlamps consist of a solar array topped with a wind turbine, and they are capable of generating up to 380 W of power.

 

Designed and manufactured by Urban Green Energy, these solar/wind powered street lamps are mounted to a standard galvanized steel pole that can be made locally and easily swapped with older street lamps. The turbine on top can be either a 300 W 2nd Generation vertical axis wind turbine (VAWT) or a horizontal axis wind turbine. Mounted on the side of the pole are 2 solar panels made by F3 Solar that are capable of generating up to 80 W of power.
The street lamp is capable of producing up to 380 W of power if the sun was shining and the wind were blowing, and the street lamps save excess energy generated in a battery that powers their high efficiency LEDs through the night. Since every location and project is different, Urban Green Energy is taking a component-focused approach to the street lamps’ design – the LED lights, solar panels, wind turbine, tower height, and battery storage are all easily scaled to best fit a particular project.
Decorations on the pole compliment the sweeping lines of the wind turbine and can be customized to whatever color the buyer wants. The hybrid LED lamps seem more like an commissioned art piece rather than a standard industrial looking street lamp.
Urban Green Energy’s Hybrid Wind/Solar Lamps are already gaining attention around the world – they just signed an agreement with an undisclosed city in China to outfit their streets with these street lamps. The company also offers wind turbines ranging from 300 W up to 10 kW, and we recently got a sneak peak at their new 2nd generation 4kW VAWT. We think this new company is on the right track, and we can’t wait to see their hybrid turbines hit the streets.

Fields of Windstalks Harvest Kinetic Energy From the Wind

by Ariel Schwartz

Some consider wind turbines to be garish blips on serene landscapes. Not so with this Windstalk concept, which utilizes a series of 1203 kinetic energy-generating “stalks” to harness power. Designed for Abu Dhabi’s Masdar city, the project takes its inspiration from the way wheat fields blow in the wind.

The 55 meter-high stalks, which are made of carbon fiber-reinforced resin poles, contain piezeoelectric discs and electrodes that generate current. The current is stored in two chambers that act as a battery. LED lights placed on the pole tips glow or dim depending on how much wind is present. When wind is completely absent, the LEDs stay dark.
The Windstalk remains a concept, although its creators say that “It is based on a set of systems that already exist and work.” No word on how much energy a field of Windstalks could create, but we’re guessing it requires a lot of land to generate a significant amount of power.

 

“Wind Lens” Turbines Could Boost Energy Generation 3X

by Ariel Schwartz

Forget about traditional tri-blade wind turbines — the ultra-efficient turbine of the future might look completely different if Kyushu University professor Yuji Ohya has anything to say about it. Ohya and his team recently unveiled the Wind Lens, a honeycomb-like structure that purportedly triples the amount of wind energy that can be produced by offshore turbines.

The Wind Lens was unveiled at this month’s Yokohama Renewable Energy International Exhibition 2010. The structure works similarly to a magnifying glass that intensifies light from the sun — except in this case, the lens intensifies wind flow. Ohya’s design doesn’t have too many moving parts — just a hoop (AKA a brimmed diffuser) that “magnifies” wind power, and a turbine that is rotated by wind captured from the hoop. Each Lens, which measures 112 meters in diameter, can provide enough energy for an average household.
Ohya doesn’t know if the Lens will go into commercial production, but if nothing else, it could provide a more aesthetically appealing alternative to traditional offshore turbines.

 

Ultra-Efficient Bladeless Wind Turbine Inspired by Nikolai Tesla

by Philip Proefrock

SolarAero recently unveiled a new bladeless wind turbine that offers several advantages over current wind turbines — it emits hardly any noise in operation, has few moving parts, and since it doesn’t use spinning blades it’s much less of a hazard to bats and birds. The whole assembly is inside an enclosed housing, with screened inlets and outlets to keep animals safely out. It also can be installed on sensitive locations such as radar installations or sites under surveillance where the rotating blades cause detrimental effects. Read on to learn what makes it work.

 

 

 

Whether they are vertical axis or horizontal axis, typical wind turbines work by catching moving air with blades, and using that force to rotate the axle, which turns a generator to produce electricity. Instead of pushing on blades, SolarAero’s turbine is based on the Tesla turbine originally developed by Nikolai Tesla. The principle of the Tesla turbine is to set up an array of closely-spaced, very thin, and extremely smooth metal disks. The viscous flow of air moving in parallel to the disks is what propels the turbine, instead of buffeting blades with moving air. This makes for a more compact mechanism with only one moving part: the turbine-driveshaft assembly.
According to the company, this turbine should cost around $1.50 per watt of rated output, and have a lifetime operating cost of about 12 cents per kilowatt-hour — comparable to, or even better than, current retail electrical rates in many parts of the country. This would make the SolarAero turbine about 2/3 the price of a comparable bladed unit, and because of the significantly lower operating costs, lifetime maintenance could be just 1/4 the cost. At this point the project is still under development, and no manufacturer has been lined up as of yet.

Turbine Light Illuminates Highways With Wind

by Ariel Schwartz

As more and more people across the world adopt cars as their primary mode of transportation, well-lit highways become increasingly important. But how can we sustainably power all those energy-sucking lights? TAK Studio addressed that question in their entry into this year’s Greener Gadgets competition to find the green technology solution of the future. Dubbed the Turbine Light, their design aims to illuminate our roadways using the power of the wind.

TAK’s wind-powered light uses the moving air from cars zipping by on the highway to generate energy that can be used to power roadside lighting. It’s a controversial idea–could wind from passing cars actually provide enough power for lighting?–but one that has the potential to save lots of cash in already wind-heavy regions. Alternatively, cities might consider using solar-powered lights instead. The idea has been proven to work many times over, including at the recent COP15 climate change conference.