As you can probably tell from my accent I live
in the UK, which is one of the windiest countries in Europe. It's a meteorological advantage that's
enabled us to deploy no fewer than two and a half thousand huge wind turbines around the coastline
of our little island with a combined generating capacity of almost 13 gigawatts providing up to
13% of Britain's electricity. It's not just us those, I'm sure you know. Wind power is one of
the fastest growing renewable energy sources in many parts of the world. The laws of physics and
fluid dynamics, which include the fact that wind speeds are generally faster at higher altitudes
and that doubling the wind speed increases its energy by eight times, mean that wind turbines
are growing ever larger in order to capture that energy and increase their efficiency. But it's
a pretty expensive business with the largest turbines in the world now coming in at well over
12 million dollars to manufacture and install. Massive installations like these also, quite
rightly, require extensive planning and regulatory permissions before they can proceed, and they
typically require some kind of financial backing and guarantees from national governments to
prevent them becoming very costly white elephants further down the line. For all those reasons
wind generation today remains almost exclusively the responsibility of larger centralized
state or national power producers and grids. That fact hasn't stopped a small but growing
number of intrepid innovators from trying to harness the power of wind at micro generation
level though. The potential prize of cheap, efficient off-grid electricity has produced
all sorts of weird and wonderful designs in recent years, one or two of which we've looked
at on this channel. And now there's a new kid on the block with a radical new roof mounted design
that has no visible moving parts, makes no noise, and can be used in combination with solar panels,
on the same roof, to provide a far more consistent and continuous flow of electrical power to
the building below. So how does that work? Hello and welcome to Just Have a Think. The
innovation I'm referring to has been developed by a US start-up called Aeromine Technologies. The
design is really the culmination of a lifetime of experience in the wind industry for its inventor,
Carsten Westergard. Carsten started his career as a wind technician 28 years ago and more recently
has held senior executive positions with Vestas North America and LM wind. He developed this
particular technological breakthrough in 2016 in conjunction with Sandia National Labs who are
affiliated with the United States Department of Energy. I caught up with Aeromine's co-founder
and CEO David Asarnow via Zoom recently to find out more about the system and the impact it
could have on the wind energy market. One of the major advantages that the Aeromine design
has over pretty much all the other micro wind power generation systems that have come before is
that it has no exposed rotating blades or fins. We'll take a closer look at how that actually
works a bit later in the video, but one of the big bonuses of having no visible moving parts is
that the unit is virtually silent in operation, and that overcomes one of the main objections
raised against existing roof mounted wind turbine technologies. It also means the construction of
an Aeromine unit doesn't require any expensive advanced materials like carbon fibre, which
makes it relatively inexpensive to produce. Plus it's been designed to come apart very
easily for shipping. That keeps costs down even further for regular customers, but it also
means these units could be inexpensively deployed to remote locations, either as part of emergency
disaster recovery or as a full-time installation. The genius of the design lies in two main
elements. The first is the shape of the static fins on the top section. They're very similar to
components that can be found on Formula One racing cars which are there to optimize wind flow and
aerodynamic interactions across the vehicle to keep it pinned firmly to the track and moving as
fast as possible. Carsten Westergard and his team applied those same fluid dynamic principles to
arrive at the optimum shape of this particular application. The static windfalls exploit
the phenomenon known as the Venturi effect, named after an 18th century Italian physicist
called Giovanni Batista Venturi who first discovered it. What Venturi found was that if
a fluid is forced to flow through a constricted section of a pipe its flow speed increases
and the fluid pressure drops. Fluids will always move from a high pressure region to a
low pressure region in an attempt to equalize the overall system. It's kind of how the
shape of an airplane wing provides lift. Aeromine takes advantage of this phenomenon by
positioning its units at the edge of a building and facing them towards the annually predominant
wind direction. At the top of a building's wall there's a significant increase in wind speed
as the air flowing up the wall is pressed over the roof. On a flat roof building that effect is
particularly pronounced. The static aerofoils of the Aeromine unit have been optimized to create
a negative pressure which draws that rising air up even more quickly. So we've got a strong flow
of air across our unit. All that's needed now is to put an internal propeller generator into that
airflow and connect a couple of wires to it to produce an electrical current that can be fed
directly into the building system. It's really a very elegantly simple design that belies
the many years of research and development in computer simulations and wind tunnels to
arrive at the perfect shape. And the fact that the Aeromine units run along the edge of a roof
means that the rest of the roof is still available for an installation of solar PV panels. So of
the building operator can potentially use two completely complementary technologies to achieve
much more consistent electricity generation over a longer period of each day. As solar energy starts
to fade during the afternoon the Aeromine system can continue to provide power well into the
evening. And if the rooftop installations are partnered up with a battery energy storage system
in the building's plant room then there's the potential to operate almost entirely independently
of grid power. The units themselves are roughly 3 metres or 10 feet in height, with a power rating
of 5 kilowatts. That means a single Aeromine unit has the same capacity as about 16 standard solar
panels but with a far smaller footprint. And because they have no moving parts and operate
silently they have a minimal environmental and visual impact which means planning consent
should be far easier to achieve too. In Spring of 2022 Aeromine installed their
first commercial pilot in the Detroit area in partnership with the German industrial giant
BASF. BASF had apparently been looking for an on-site power generation solution for years that
could work across their extensive international portfolio. They worked very closely with Aeromine,
holding weekly discussions to iron out any issues to ensure the pilot installation was a success.
If the numbers stack up then the partnership with BASF could represent a huge opportunity for
Aeromine to gain traction in Europe and elsewhere. The original focus for Aeromone's technology was
the millions of large industrial buildings with flat rooftops that scatter the landscapes of the
United States and most other countries around the world, but David Asarnow told me that they've
also had interest from multi-family developers and owners who are really prioritizing on-site
power generation for all the reasons of low carbon independence and sustainability that we're
all hearing so much about in the news these days. Those developers can see the opportunity to shave
a little bit off their peak energy costs and of course most of them are now planning their systems
to be able to cope with the rapid deployments of the electric vehicle infrastructure that looks
set to grow very rapidly in the coming years. Now as always I suspect many of you
good folks out there are keen to see the cold hard numbers like levelized cost
of electricity and all of that lovely stuff. At this early stage in their evolution the
company is not yet divulging that information, but David Asarnow did confirm that the real
world performance of the BASF unit has been remarkably consistent with the efficiencies and
costings produced by their computer simulations, and he reckons that once they reach full-scale
production the Aeromine units will be cheaper than solar panels, producing 50% more energy for
the same cost. That's something I'll keep an eye on obviously in the coming months and we may well
come back to have another look at Aeromine in a year or so to review how they're progressing.
In the meantime though this does look like a very promising technology that does away with
many of the problems faced by other small micro wind generation solutions, so I'll be interested
to see what you think. Could it be a real game changer or do you see problems that we haven't
discussed here? If you've got industry experience of small wind power generation systems then maybe
you've got some insights that you can share with us all. If you do then, as always, the place to
do all that is in the comments section below. That's it for this week though. If you found this
video useful and informative then please do give us a like and hit that subscribe button if you
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enjoy this video too. As always thanks very much for watching. Have a great week, and remember
to just have a think. See you next week.
