A lot of work
is being done on the possibility of incorporating wind turbines in a
built environment, and naturally, as a wind energy enthusiastic, I was
curious. what's the potential? how much of a crowded high rise
buildings heavily populated city electricity consumption can you
produce with urban wind turbines? who can tell me?
well, since I didn't find my answer in the net or in the electronic
data base of the Technion , I decided to check it out for myself.
There Are a million Urban wind turbine designs out there, more or less
sophisticated, more or less real (that is, don't produce all of your
house's consumption with a turbine the size of a small solar water
heater collector ) but no asummption of a theoretical top figure -
percent of consumption possibly met by urban based turbines.
my model is a simple one. The wind speed above the buildings and
between them is estimated according to log law, with data from a
urban wind study
of L.A. commercial area. The friction velocity is changed to
accommodate the wind speed charestaristics of NYC - 4-5 m/s at the
surrounding airports and central park, and the buildings used are the
top 2000 highest buildings in new york. i took one 400 Kw turbine on
the top of every building - 20 meters above the top, assuming a
darreius or H-rotor turbine, with an efficiency (averaged) of 0.3 . The
VAWT's handle well the
skewed flow above a roof.
I also incorporated turbines between the buildings, 2 meter below the
average highest of both buildings - with a suggested hanging wind
turbine (but anything else more conventional can do the job).
The results are between 2-5% of the energy consumption of 8 million new
yorkers, with a consumption of 13 Kw-hour per day can be met this way.
70 percent from roof top turbines and 30 percent from hanging turbines.
The result suggests the real purpose of urban wind turbines - not
producing a bulk amount of electric consumption so much as producing
electricity near the consumer, or even while owned by the consumer
(Co-op) , and reminding him of his own consumption - leading to more
awareness and less consumption.
As
Paul Gipe
writes - urban wind turbines can be the normal HAWT's installed near a
city or even further away but owned by the residents - instead of noisy
and problematic urban wind turbines - which then will fulfill both
Urban turbines missions as i see them - producing clean energy and
leading to more awareness and consequently less consumption by the
consumer since he will be a partial owner of them.
I'm also all for urban wind turbines, developed to be incorporated in a
building, quietly and safely, as long as we don't sell fantasys -
Because as my study shows, as simple as it is - we will defiantly not
meet all our consumption by urban wind turbines. Even for a double
hight city with 8 Kw-hour consumption and the same amount of residents,
you get 10 percent at most. and this is defiantly on the optimistic
side.
So let urban turbines be a part of the clean energy mix, with solar
cells and utility grid connected large HAWT's, and the rising
awareness of the consumers.
My suggested hanging turbine concept