The vertical windmill on ice uses a number of skis to benefit from the low friction of the ice. The windmill spins around an axis that is fixed into the ice. The small prototype works very good, but if scaled up in size it would be necessary to take lifting forces into account. [Video]

A similar concept is applied to a vertical windmill floating on water, contained within a rigid structure. The windmill rotates smoothly with the use of a simple water bearing. [Video]

Gripenberg also made a wind-powered carousel from a 6 ton ice sheet. [Video]

Images: Simon Gripenberg

A wind power system made from plastic buckets is seen on boats at a floating village in Hanoi, Vietnam June 29, 2016. REUTERS/Kham

“Vietnamese families living in slums along the Red River in Hanoi are using red plastic buckets and old printers to help light homes, cook meals and slash electricity costs by as much as a third.

The recycled goods form the blades and motors of electrical generators that power old motorcycle batteries to illuminate lamps with a brightness equivalent to a 45-Watt light bulb.

Though the output generated is small, it makes a significant difference for families previously denied power because they lived too far from a power station or had to ration supply because of the expense.”

More pictures and information at Reuters: Plastic buckets, broken printers shine light on Hanoi’s poor. Via Playground Magazine.

See all our low-tech windmill posts.

Almost a quarter of a million windmills worldwide will need to be replaced by 2030. The rotor blades are made of valuable composite materials that are difficult to recover at the end of their energy generating life. New generation rotor blades made of glass or carbon fibre composite material have average lifespans of between 10 and 25 years. Recycling of glass fibre composite is possible though complex. Recycling of the more highly valued carbon fibre composite is currently impossible. In many EU countries landfill of carbon composites is now prohibited. Thus, many rotor blades at the end of their wind turbine life are currently shredded and incinerated. At current growth rates, by 2034, there will be about 225,000 tonnes of rotor blade composite material produced annually, worldwide.

The Dutch firm Superuse Studios has found a solution to the growing mountains of waste generated by the wind industry: making use of end-of-life rotor blades in design and architecture. The realised projects demonstrate the technical applications and potential for blade made designs and architecture. In their second life as design and architectural elements, rotor blades could be used for a further 50-100 years, or more. Blade made designs are durable, iconic, compete economically, and reduce the ecological footprint of projects in which they are used.

REwind Willemsplein

Public seating made from rotor blades was designed and installed for the Rotterdam municipality. The REwind public seating is located at Willemsplein, a public square at the foot of the well-known Erasmus bridge. The municipality was in need of durable, indestructible seating with iconic quality for people waiting to board harbour tour boats, but which could also be temporarily removed, when necessary, to make room for public events. Nine rotor blades from Friesland destined for incineration were used.

Public seating in Rotterdam. Picture by Denis Guzzo. More pictures.

Five blades were used for seating, three as backrests, and one as place marker. By adjusting the angles and positions of the blades ergonomic public seating with a diversity of seating options was created. Seating depths vary from 30 to 80 cm, providing upright seating to more relaxed lounging options. The 6 metre long blades are attached with bolts to 1m3 concrete aggregate blocks made heavy enough to keep the lightweight blades in place. The aggregate is 100% recycled concrete rubble from Rotterdam.

Wikado Playground

The first Wikado built at the Meidoorn playground at Oude Noorden, Rotterdam, was built for the same budget as a comparable standard playground, and has an ecological footprint fifty times smaller. The playground was designed to maximise imaginative play, social interaction, and children driven game development. The inherent properties of rotor blades make this material an excellent choice: weather and wind resistant, organic, ergonomic shapes, and a strong and rigid structure. The cylindrical portion of 30 m long blades has a diameter of 1.4 m and makes for interior play spaces. One of the five 30 m blades was used intact. The remaining four blades were cut into three sections.

Playground in Rotterdam. Picture by Denis Guzzo. More pictures.

The four cylindrical end sections were transformed into play towers that stand around the central play zone. Each tower has a distinct and recognizable character. The ‘towerflat’ has three rooms with peeking holes, the ‘watchtower’ with a former F16 cockpit on top, the ‘water tower’ with hand pump for children to pump water for mixing with sand, and the ‘slide tower’ to which the original slippery sides from the site are attached.

REwind Almere

Construction is underway of the Superuse Studios’ designed shelters for the thousands of daily commuters to use the bus-train transfer station at Almere Poort. The durable and indestructible shelter design uses four 30m rotor blades. Waste rotor blades are easy to find in Almere, Holland’s #1 wind-energy region. Stacked in a Stonehenge like manner two 30 m blades are used to create a large shelter. Two of these large shelters are being built. The changing shape over the length of the blades gives a shelter roof that morphs into different shapes depending on the angle from which is it is viewed.

A bus shelter made from rotor blades. Source: Blade Made, Superuse Studios.

Every part of the blade is used. The blades were cut in four sections to harness the different inherent qualities along the length of the blade. This gives construction pieces that are essentitally readymade for different construction purposes. The strongest and heaviest part (former connection to the wind turbine axial) is used as roof supporting columns, and the widest part of the blade for the roof. The tip of the blade is used for the long seating bench, and the circular end pieces are used for large planting pots placed around the site. Completion is expected by the end of March 2014.

Future Plans

Superuse Studios has been invited to partner with the Danish ‘Genvind Consortium‘,  a consortium of over 20 organisations, including Vestas, the biggest wind turbine producer of the world. The main goal of this consortium is to find solutions to the growing mountains of waste generated by the wind industry. Superuse Studios have joined the Genvind project to demonstrate how worldwide blade made projects that reuse wind rotor blades can play an important role in the processing of this composite material. The collaboration already resulted in very concrete plans for a blade made bridge in Denmark.

Thanks to Tim Joye.

“Flagged trees only reflect the prevailing wind direction of the strongest winds, which may occur during only part of the year. Seasonal variations in the wind have a pronounced effect on the type of wind deformation and these effects are characterized in this handbook. Techniques for estimating the mean annual wind speed have been developed using indices of wind effects on trees. These indices have been calibrated on two widely distributed species of conifers. The main conclusions are that trees provide a simple, inexpensive and quick method for identifying promising locations where more detailed measurements can verify the wind potential.”

Trees as an indicator of wind power potential (.pdf), John E. Wade & E. Wendell Hewson, 1979.
Vegetation as an indicator of high wind velocity (.pdf), DOE report, John E. Wade & R.W. Baker, 1977

More low-tech wind power.

“We investigated the use of counter-rotating vertical-axis wind turbines (VAWTs) in order to achieve higher power output per unit land area than existing wind farms consisting of HAWTs. Full-scale field tests of 10-m tall VAWTs in various counter-rotating configurations were conducted under natural wind conditions during summer 2010. Whereas modern wind farms consisting of HAWTs produce 2 to 3 watts of power per square meter of land area, these field tests indicate that power densities an order of magnitude greater [21 to 47 watts] can potentially be achieved by arranging VAWTs in layouts that enable them to extract energy from adjacent wakes and from above the wind farm.”

“The results suggest an alternative approach to wind farming that has the potential to concurrently reduce the cost, size, and environmental impacts of wind farms.”

Read more: ‘Potential order-of-magnitude enhancement of wind farm power density via counterrotating vertical-axis wind turbine arrays’, John O. Dabiri. Introduction. Research paper (pdf). Via Ecogeek. 

We have power systems built on a central station model, which assumes that we should build large power station distant from demand, on the grounds of economic efficiency, which favours large-scale installations. This really does not fit with the potential that renewable power offers. The central station model introduces a grid-dependence that renewable power should be able to avoid, revealing an often acute disparity between resource intensity, demand and grid capacity. Renewable power (used in the small-scale decentralized manner it is best suited for) should decrease grid dependence, but we employ it in such a way as to increase our vulnerability to socioeconomic complexity.

Renewable energy is best used in situ, adjacent to demand. It is best used in conjunction with a storage component which would insulate consumers from supply disruption, but Feed-In Tariff (FIT) programmes typically prohibit this explicitly. Generators are expected to sell all their production to the grid and buy back their own demand. This leaves them every bit as vulnerable to supply disruption as anyone who does not have their own generation capacity. This turns renewable generation into a personal money generating machine with critical vulnerabilities. It is no longer about the energy, which should be the focus of any pubicly funded energy programme.

FIT programmes typically remunerate a wealthy few who install renewables in private applications for their own benefit, and who may well have done so in the absence of public subsidies. If renewables are to do anything at all to help run our societies in the future, we need to move from publicly-funded private applications towards public applications benefitting the collective. We do not have an established model for this at present, and we do not have time to waste. Maximizing renewable energy penetration takes a lot of time and a lot of money, both of which will be in short supply in the near future. The inevitable global austerity measures are not going to make this task any easier.”

Read more at The Automatic Earth. Pictures credit.

“I have endeavoured in the following pages not only to interest the practical amateur in a branch of mechanics unfortunately much neglected, but also to present a series of practical original designs that should prove useful to every reader from the youngest to the most advanced.”

Chapter 1 : windmill evolution
Chapter 2 : a small working model windmill
Chapter 3 : a small American type windmill
Chapter 4 : a small working windmill
Chapter 5 : a practical working windmill
Chapter 6 : production of electricity by wind power

Windmills and wind motors – how to build and run them (1910).

Related:

• Wind powered factories
• A wind-powered knitting machine
• Scale models of Dutch Industrial windmills
• The home made windmills of Nebraska
• Building plans for Dutch industrial windmills.

So while we suggested to redesign traditional windmills by using modern, high-tech materials, the German company TimberTower proposes the opposite: redesign modern wind turbines by using traditional, low-tech materials.

Large wind turbines are usually made of steel, and while they definitely deliver more energy over their lifetime than it takes to produce them (contrary to small wind turbines), using no energy at all would of course be even better – and cheaper.

Wood is easier to transport (the TimberTower is manufactured out of glued laminated timber panels which are assembled on-site), doesn’t need to be mined, has no corrosion issues (think of offshore turbines), and it captures carbon. And while trees bend in strong winds, they usually don’t break.

Using a timber tower for a 100 metre high wind turbine can save approximately 300 tons of sheet steel, writes the company at their website. One “TimberTower” also ties up approximately 400 tons of CO2. They say they can build them as high as 200 metres. Serial production should start in 2010. More:  TimberTower. Related: wooden pipelines, wooden bridges.

Italian company Kite Gen is building a full-scale 3 megawatt version (video) of its promising wind turbine concept, we learn from MetaEfficient. A large kite is drawn upward to altitudes around 800 metres, where average wind speeds are four times as strong as they are near ground-based wind turbines. The kites power turbines by rising and flying back to gound level continuously. The retrieval phase is said to require a small fraction of the power that is generated during the flight. A first prototype was built in 2006. One of the recent improvements is an automatic launching system, powered by fans. The technology generated an interesting discussion at the Oil Drum last summer. Previously: Floating windmills – energy from the clouds. Related: Kiteboating & Kite Aerial Photography.

“The study found that predicted performance exceeded actual performance by a factor of 15 to 17. With the worst-performing systems, the electricity required to run the electronics exceeded the electricity production, so the wind turbines were net consumers of electricity”. Read.

Thanks, Brent Eubanks. Related: Small windmills put to the test / Urban Windmills harm the environment.