'Wind Turbine Wall' Turns Power Generation Into An Aesthetic Feature

New York City-based designer Joe Doucet doesn't see why renewable energy generation shouldn't actively make a home more beautiful, so he's putting together a series of "kinetic walls" using rotary wind turbines to achieve some hypnotic visual effects, Loz Blain reported for New Atlas.

Photo Insert: "Wind Turbine Wall," by Joe Doucet

Each wall would feature some 25 vertical turbines, each connected to a 400-watt generator for a total peak power output of 10 kW. Like a rooftop solar setup, these could either be connected to the grid, or run through a battery system for storage.

Doucet says they'll be "almost silent," producing "no more noise than a gentle whirling," and safe for use around children, since there are no pinch-points in the rotation and even a little one could easily stop the lightweight blades from turning.

Capable of catching the wind from any direction but the vertical, they could run as a stand-alone system or be paired with a solar array to generate power at overlapping times. Doucet says he wants to keep these walls "very affordable," and is "interviewing potential partners to bring this thing to make."

But here's the problem: wind doesn't work that way. The average capacity factor for land-based wind turbines in the US is around 35 percent, so if these kinetic walls performed at a similar capacity factor to the whopping big three-blade horizontal-axis industrial wind turbines dotted along windy American coastlines, you could expect more like 84 kWh a day.

But they won't, because these vertical-axis turbines perform a lot less efficiently. Those boring-looking three-bladers always have all their blades in the wind catching a ride, while vertical-axis turbines by their very design can only have one surface catching the wind at a time. And they lose more power as the wind blows on the back of the blade coming back around.

WEEKLY FEATURE : MVP Group Keeps Lights On During Pandemic