More Wind Turbines

In the quest for electricity produced cheaply and efficiently the Government has missed a trick, or have they simply ignored it so their friendly supporting companies can make money and swell their party donations; you decide.

Solar is constantly being promoted but why? Many other forms of generation are available such as water or hydro power and wind in the form of offshore and onshore wind turbines and they are broadly called by their designed lay out which are Horizontal Axis Rotary Turbine and Vertical Axis Rotary Turbine which are generally abbreviated to HART and VART so you can instantly recognise the layout.
Generally the HART system is used as maximum output is required and it gets this by using a set of propellers similar to an aircrafts which turn and this turns a gearbox which is connected to an alternator and it is the alternator which produces the electricity which is fed into a regulator similar to that 3 phase system in your cars alternator which rectifies it to a specific voltage and phase/phases. It is then generally fed into an inverter and it is this inversion which feeds the electricity grid with the electricity produced to distribute it through the network. These HART generators have many problems and that is that they follow the perceived wisdom that they have to be mounted as high as possible for maximum wind and this means fabricating and shipping huge towers to stand them on and the skills of men not just to erect them but to install their systems at such heights. Many problems exist and the first is that they are basically inefficient at low wind speeds and many will not operate at low wind speeds as the wind is not fast enough to overcome the friction of their magnets and the next is to that of wind direction which constantly changes meaning they are buffeted from all angles and cannot generate electricity at their optimum and need something called a “yaw system” to continually turn the blades into the changing wind direction and this can be either a mechanical tail which rotates the turbine using the wind or a purely mechanical or electromechanical system which uses sensors to measure and detect the wind direction and uses either a hydraulic or electric motor to rotate the head so the blades are directly into the wind and generating at or very near their optimum.
More recent problems have shown to manifest and that is fire as the gearboxes regularly ignite and with everything at the top of the wind turbine it means firefighters have to get to the top to extinguish the fire or simply let it burn out and this seriously weakens the structure to the risk of a collapsing tower which is a very real and a huge concern if you next to or nearby to a windfarm and in a towers fall path.

Now we have to understand wind and not the “my hubby had a ruby last night” type of wind as wind is the most important part of any wind turbine as it is its fuel source and wind by its very nature is inconsistent and the above HART system requires consistent wind at high speeds to be efficient and if the wind speeds are too high they actually shut down due to the mechanical loadings on the system and mounting tower. This is often done with a braking system which often just switches them off and feathers their blades so they cannot transmit the wind power to the gearbox, or by regenerative braking which back feeds some of the electricity to resist the output load using an electrical friction and some simply use brake discs and/or drums as you would find on most motor vehicles but on a much larger scale. More modern systems use a hybrid system where they may use regenerative braking to slow the blades down to a safe speed and keep it running just below its maximum designed speed and if it cannot hold it there the disc brakes are applied to stop the turbine completely until the wind speed drops sufficiently and some systems have a pre set yaw adjustment system which rotates it off the optimum wind speed position until the turbine speed drops sufficiently.
In all cases we are trying to achieve something called “laminar flow” and this is best described as wind of a consistent speed in a consistent linear direction and in the UK and most of the world this will never happen as winds gust and change direction and their speed changes massively and regularly and you have natural obstructions such as trees or buildings and those funny hills getting in the way. All of these things impede wind flow and alter its direction, characteristics and speed. HART systems require much higher wind speeds to start their systems and once running at their optimum speed or within their optimum range they can produce significantly more power than most other systems but they need wind of a suitable speed to be directed directly onto their blades to achieve this and anything else sees their efficiency and output plummet.
Next we have “non laminar flow” often called dirty air as this has no regular direction or speed and it is exactly what our VART or Vertical Axis Rotary Turbine requires as it can accept air from all directions and at all speeds as they start producing electricity at much lower speeds than a HART system and many produce with wind speeds as little as 1.2M/S airspeed and this is due to their design which doesn’t need their propellers constantly turning into the wind. Non laminar airflow is often caused by the irregularity of the environment and the obstructions of trees and buildings and other man made obstructions such as hills.
In-between these we have something called pulsed airflow and this is where the air comes in pulses and often both HART and VART systems can operate with pulsed air if it is fast enough.

VART systems offer a much better compromise in built up areas as their low start up speeds mean they are producing electricity before a HART system has woken up due to its low wind speed start up requirements and low speed operations; what they lack is the high speed massive electricity outputs the HART systems produce and they make this up with their low wind speed outputs. Imagine the traditional scenario of an English Autumn such as 2022 where it was fairly still and the average wind speeds were 3.2M/S and your HART system produced a consistent 1500 watts at these speeds and the VART system needs 5M/S wind speed to start up so it produced nothing. So what do you accept, 1500 watts or nothing.
VART systems can operate on natural and man made pulsed air so what are these? Natural pulsed air is the wind gusting while man made pulsed air can be derived from man made activities such as vehicles travelling down a road at higher speeds and this is known as vehicle air pumping and is well known about. Imagine filling your bath with water and dipping your hand in and then trying to pull it forwards as fast as you can and this creates pressure in front of your hand and to both sides of it and you now have a water pulse and air operates in exactly the same way as water and this is the basis of vehicle air pumping as each passing car pushes a proportion of the air sideways and some upwards to dilute any pollution.

VART systems don’t need the height or unobstructed air flow that a HART system needs to be effective and the average mounting height of a VART system is 1.5 – 2.5 metres which means you can mount them from the ground and not have to scale the massive towers HART systems rely upon for their unimpeded airflow and this makes them much cheaper to install. My idea is very simple and this is based upon very recent figures taken from the M2 in Kent which shows it has pulsed air in the form of pumped air which averages 5.8M/s for the 16 hours a day of off peak travel and during the remaining peak hour travel of 8 hours it averaged over double at 11.7M/S of airspeed and after a few calculations this would yield just under 6Kw of electricity per hour per kilometre of motorway in the UK. If we turn this into financial equations and converted every UK motorway to allow VART systems to be installed it would provide so much electricity it would yield just over £25Million per year in returns based upon the current feed in tariff (FIT) and with so much electricity so cheaply generated and so easily maintained it would be silly not to invest in it. VART systems could be installed to existing lamp standards at 2M high and wired directly into the lamp post wiring and the motorway network could be quickly covered but not just them as every radio mast or tower could have several systems fitted and be self sufficient in powering themselves..

VART systems are generally the better system for home use as their low wind speed start up’s mean they can produce electricity in both the low and medium speed ranges and they can produce it in wind you wouldn’t even recognise as wind and a VART system producing power at 1.5 amps per hour, every hour, for a full 24 hours at 12 volts for battery charging means you have obtained a lot of power you would have lost with a HART system and that 36 amps is safely stored in your batteries.
VART systems are much cheaper because they are vertical rotors and the motor is generally mounted at the top or bottom of your wind array and this makes them cheaper to build and easier to install and maintain because they don’t have to be sat on massive poles metres into the air and above any surrounding buildings or trees.

In simple terms which is best?

For people with sufficient land to install a HART system to a suitable height and with single direction high speed airflow to maintain the turbine within its optimum working speeds for the majority of the time it wins every time as it produces lots of power which can be fed back into the grid and you get paid for it, people on Orkney make a lot of money because of high wind speeds.

If you are in a residential or other area with lots of natural or man made obstructions it would be the VART system every time as their low wind speed start up requirements often mean you are producing when HART systems haven’t yet started turning and their requirement of not having to be placed high up on a pole, makes them cheaper and easier to install and maintain.

Ikea Giltbrook Case Study

When Ikea decided to build their site at Giltbrook it has to be financially viable and make as little impact on the environment as possible and their site was chosen at Giltbrook as it was close to the M1 motorway so had direct road links to the Midlands road networks so it met all these criteria but Giltbrook is located in something called the Erewash Valley and as its name states, it is a valley but not just any old valley as it is nearly totally surrounded on all sides by hills which means non laminar airflow and this created the first problem. Next was their specific requirement to heat as much of the estate as possible by using alternative methods and beep bore geothermal was looked at as the most likely contender as it could provide free heat without any pumping and this constant recirculation meant constant heat.
The next major problem is that the Erewash Valley is littered with many old coal and clay mines and within throwing distance of Ikea you could literally throw stones at 4 former coal mines which are known about but again what about the coal mines they never knew about and are not recorded and when they built the nearby Ilkeston bypass they found 57 coal shafts they didn’t know about which were not recorded and a whole series of coal workings from a shaft in a back garden.
One break is available in the surrounding hills and this is why Central television located to Giltbrook industrial estate as they could send their signal straight down the Erewash Valley and onto London and Giltbrook industrial estate was bought up by Ikea to build their retail estate on as they had designs on building multiple retail outlets on the site.

Wind speeds were measured and they were too low to be useful to a HART system and the wind speeds were generally moderate which was around 85% of the time and too low for the HART system to provide adequate electricity.
Health and Safety was next and mounting them low down meant less H&S measures to comply with such as working at height and next was customers and traffic as many customers came in vans and sometimes small lorries and a HART system with its constantly rotating blades and tail rotors would likely hit a vehicle and Ikea would be liable for any damage to a customer’s vehicle.
Wind speed measurements were taken and it was noted that the wind constantly swirled constantly and this automatically precluded the HART system and automatically included the VART system on the grounds it could accept wind from all directions so the car park was laid out to accept VART systems. These were put onto planned signage and lighting poles and fitted onto wide pavements so if a vehicles rear wheels hit the kerb their overhang wouldn’t hit the posts and damage the VART system and knock any signposts or lamp posts down and were high enough not to be interfered with by shoppers. Many of their posts were either telescopic so they could be lowered from inside the post or hinged so they could be tilted over and with them being located on the wide pavements they could barrier sufficient pavement off to work safely while pedestrians could safely pass.

Ikea invested heavily in new VART turbine systems and the blades were the most critical area as they selected a corkscrew design with numerous corkscrew blades which meant two facets of the corkscrew were always in contact with the wind and this maintained turbine speeds higher than those previously achieved and it meant the turbine didn’t have to rotate to catch the wind. At the time their VART designs were way ahead of anything else and the retail industry were citing halogen lighting as cheap and more efficient as LED lighting technologies were in their infancy and a combination of turbine efficiency and halogen retail lighting meant Ikea retail park produced 78% of the electricity they used in their first year. Times and technology move on and once LED lighting became the go to lighting technology Giltbrook Retail Park became self sufficient in both heating and electricity and generated more than they used which was instantly fed back into the grid.

Only in the middle of cold winters did they need to turn any outside heating on or raw any electricity from the grid and what they drew out had been put into the grid earlier in the year, many fold.

Ikea installed 300 VART units initially and they generated 30 volts @ 3.8 amps or 114 watts of power per hour or 2.736Kw or power per turbine, per 24 hour day or a combined 820Kw of power per 24 hour day.

Turbines have been constantly developed and new and improved VART systems have been installed and they are now at the point where they produce so much electricity that it has become a consistent source of income in its own right.

Do you have a link with photos of the turbines at Ikea?

flyingfish wrote:Do you have a link with photos of the turbines at Ikea?

Not the ones they have installed currently but they tend to post pictures on their website.

Cheers. I found a couple of articles mentioning the quantity of wind turbines that Ikea has, but no pictures.

This is the store, is it? Google image is from March, though.
https://www.google.com/maps/@53.002149,-1.283167,3a,75y,160.26h,87.4t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sgOxDEIeyb2lk3SCjro_gNA!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DgOxDEIeyb2lk3SCjro_gNA%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D104.0379%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192

Thats the baby.