How To Increase Wind-turbine Output by 10 Times

Considering the fact that wind-turbines have been with us for over 100 years (See here) you might be forgiven for thinking there's nothing more for us to learn about using them to generate electric. It's a mature technology, end of story.

However, researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), don't agree. They've been experimenting with the layout of a small windfarm and they've realised there's still plenty to learn. Their findings suggest that conventional farms waste too much space and just don't use the available wind energy efficiently.

They conclude that turbines can be made shorter (= cheaper and less intrusive) and placed closer together (using less land per turbine) if VAWTs (Vertical axis wind turbines. See picture for an example) are used.

By spacing them in a certain way and ensuring neighbours turn in opposite directions, they found that they could harvest almost all the energy available without them interfering with the efficiency of the others. The result: 10 times more power than you can get from a conventional set-up.

Their next steps will be to scale up the size of the farm and look at the design of the VAWTs but it certainly appears like windfarms will look a lot different in the future.

See here for the full report.