Whenever I cover wind turbines many of you
ask about what’s available for home applications. At the moment, I’ve got both good news and
bad news. The bad news is that the current market for
residential wind is…less than great. The good news? We have a lot of new innovations that look
to improve it. The team behind the U.S.-based startup Harmony
Turbines is hoping to popularize wind energy for the masses and allow them to have their
iPhone moment. Plus, if you remember our video on Aeromine’s
rooftop models from last year, we have an update on how its “motionless” design
is progressing out in the real world. But of course, these are far and away from
the only companies working on bringing wind power generation to our backyards. Residential wind has to have its moment someday,
but when? Or should I say, “but wind?” I’m Matt Ferrell … welcome to Undecided. This video is brought to you by Surfshark,
but more on that later. I have solar on my home, but it’s obviously
only producing significant amounts of electricity on sunnier days. Being able to augment that with wind power
is incredibly appealing. That’s one of the reasons why companies
like Aeromine and Harmony Turbines have been catching my eye, but I’ll get to them in
a minute. Chances are that if you’re interested in renewable energy, you
already know that residential wind is nowhere near the
commonality and accessibility of residential solar…for now. Why? Well, I’ve previously discussed the practicality
(or maybe more accurately, the lack of it) of home wind generation in depth. But for those who aren’t up to speed, here’s
a recap. First of all, just like with any kind of home
renewable energy generation, wind requires installation space. However, what makes it different from solar
is the amount of space needed. While solar allows for somebody to make use
of the roof they already have, wind is generally much more demanding. This isn’t only a function of the height
needed to make the best use of winds found far off the ground, but the distance needed
to keep turbines away from obstacles that cause turbulence. Otherwise, you risk not only undercutting
energy production, but reducing the lifespan of the turbine. So, with those factors in mind, the U.S. Office
of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy recommends you should have at least 1 acre of land for
the proper placement of a wind turbine. For an idea of just how much that is, keep
in mind that the average square footage of a US single family home is 2,273 square feet
or 211 square meters on less than a tenth of an acre of land (or 43,560 square feet
or 4,046 square meters). However, it’s worth noting that about 19%
of the U.S. population lives in rural areas, and this typically goes hand-in-hand with having enough room to
support wind turbine systems. Sorry, city slickers. That’s not to say that urban areas are completely
out of luck forever, though. There are other companies, like O-Wind and
Alpha 311, that are focusing on integrating wind turbines directly into existing city
infrastructure. I can dive into these companies in future videos if you’re interested,
just let me know in the comments. That brings us right to the next barrier to
wind energy. It might seem obvious at first, but to take
advantage of wind power on your home turf, you need…wind. If your local weather doesn’t promote strong
and consistent gusts that keep those blades turning, then wind simply isn’t worth your
time. And not all wind is the kind that you want. So what separates “good” wind from bad? What are acceptable wind speed ranges, and
where can you find them? It depends heavily on where you live. In a 2022 study on distributed wind setups
conducted by the U.S. government’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, its authors identify
California, Minnesota, and the Northeast region as areas of interest. These places tick all three of the boxes that
allow for profitability: enough wind supply, high retail electricity prices, and favorable
political policies. On a state-by-state basis, New York, Minnesota,
Kentucky, Texas, Oklahoma, and South Dakota stand out for holding the “largest economic
potential” for residential zones. The researchers also spotlight my own personal
stomping grounds, the region of New England, as a solid contender because of its particularly
pricey electricity. It’s very expensive here. When it comes to capturing wind energy in
residential, suburban or urban settings, you’re talking about wind speeds at roughly 10 meters
(~30 feet) above surface level in most cases. And if you look at this map from NREL on those
average wind speeds, you’ll notice one major trend: most places have a speed of 3 to 5
meters per second (or roughly 6 to 12 mph). That’s not nearly fast enough for wind energy
to be cost effective … yet. However, a bunch of companies are trying to
address that shortcoming by creating cheaper, more effective turbine designs that can make
the most of what little wind resources are available. That slower, more chaotic wind is usually
a big problem … for traditional horizontal wind turbines at least. But not so for Savonius turbines — a type
of vertical axis wind turbine that historically hasn’t fared too well as a mass market option. However, this is where creative engineering
can truly shine. I spoke to Chris and Cheryl Moore from Harmony
Turbines, a small startup developing a really interesting Savonius turbine, about that exact
point. “Generally, wind in the rural and even
urban areas is not very good, so it's dirty wind. It's disrupted wind, and Savonius turbines
are the king of low wind speed power production. Now, it's not magic. This isn't like zero point energy or, you
know, getting more out of a system than you're putting in. It's not magic. It does need wind to make power. But if the majority of the United States,
and the world at large, doesn't have good wind, shouldn't we try and make a wind turbine
that can at least capitalize on that poor wind condition.” That brings me straight into possible solutions
for the more residential market. There are multiple companies, like Harmony
Turbines, trying to tap into that niche with a cheaper, smarter approach. Before we get into that, there’s also a
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love it. Link is in the description below. Thanks to Surfshark and to all of you for
supporting the channel. Back to the wind turbine companies trying
to innovate in the more residential side of the market. As I mentioned before, Harmony Turbines’
design is a type of Savonius wind turbine, which was invented by Sigurd Johannes Savonius
in 1922. They typically consist of
two or more half-cylindrical blades that are mounted on a vertical shaft in an 'S' shape. If you’ve seen an anemometer, which measures
wind speeds, it works in the same basic way. They’re designed to spin, even at low wind
speed and regardless of wind direction. The turbine captures wind energy through a
simple mechanism known as "differential drag." As wind interacts with the concave and convex
sides of the blades, the difference in drag force causes the rotor to spin. That differential drag allows it to operate
effectively in turbulent wind. While it’s known for its simplicity and
ease of construction, the Savonius turbine typically has a lower efficiency, which is
often reported to be around 15% compared to traditional propeller designs at around 50-60%. But that’s disputed by Chris Moore, the
CEO of Harmony Turbines. “If you really dig into it and look, you're
gonna see the Savonius Turbine is like the lowest crappiest out of all of them, out of
like 10 or 12 pictures, and then you'll see one that suddenly it's like up in the 30,
and you're like, well wait, what's that one? It's the same graph, just the arrows are reversed. Yeah, so, the bad data, because the internet
is just a copy and paste society, it was just making it a thousand times worse, and just
putting all this bad data out there. Um, in working with the universities, Penn
State especially, like, the professor slapped her hands down on the table, she goes, ‘Yes,
yes, yes, I've been trying to teach this for the past five years in my classes, that the
data's wrong.’ So they were excited to work with us on this
project because they wanted to help debunk this bad data.” What sets their approach apart from a typical
Savonius design is that the scoops can articulate to control the spin. “So the way we approach that problem is
we have our furling mechanism, where our scoops (or fins or whatever you want to call them)
at a certain RPM or when the turbine reaches its max RPM, they'll close in towards each
other a little bit. And the purpose of this is twofold: one, it'll
control the spin, so we're not spinning out of control. But the second thing that it does is it allows
us to continue generating power. Even though we have strong winds, even though
we're partially closed, we're still generating power. The other ones, they stop.” When wind speeds exceed a turbine's rated
spin speed, they have to shut off to protect themselves … or they’ll literally tear
themselves apart. Harmony’s approach allows it to close itself
off a little bit to slow the rotation, but not stop. The idea is to allow the device to keep going
even under the kind of wild conditions that would typically grind production to a halt. The ability to reduce the exposure area and
slow the rotational speed gives them some advantages over their larger HAWT cousins. Then there’s Aeromine, which I covered in
a previous video. I’ll link to it in the description if you
want a deeper dive, but in a nutshell, they’re using airfoils to concentrate and amplify
the wind. The purpose of an airfoil is to make physics
work for you and to take advantage of the Bernoulli Effect. This refers to how gasses and liquids flow
around an object at different speeds. Just like an airplane wing, air moves faster
over the top section of the wing than the bottom, creating lift. Looking at their turbine from the exterior,
there’s no exposed moving parts. Instead, two vertically mounted, hollow foils
stand opposite each other with a space between them. This creates a low-pressure zone, and as wind
flows through the space a short pipe then leads the captured wind to a fully enclosed
turbine located at ground level. The fact that Aeromine’s approach is to
place their devices along the front edge of a building’s flat roof isn’t by accident. Have you ever walked between tall buildings
and felt like you’re walking into a wind tunnel? I used to work in the center of Boston, and
it sometimes felt like I was one of those meteorologists trying to stand upright in
hurricane force winds while talking about the ongoing storm. That wind tunnel effect is caused by the wind
slamming into the surface of the building and getting compressed and funneled around
it. It amplifies the speed of the wind, and Aeromine
is capitalizing on that effect. “One of the things that's novel about
Aeromine is we're leveraging two fluid streams. What happens is the free wind hits the face
of a building. It creates an amplification that goes into
our generator, and at the same time, as the free wind hits the airfoils that creates a
pressure, which pulls the wind up. So instead of kind of fighting the environment
that it's on, it's using the building structure itself to help. We're leveraging the inherent aerodynamics of a building and those
flow streams to effectively amplify the wind resources.” Basically, Aeromine is taking what would normally
be a negative to a traditional horizontal wind turbine and making it an advantage. They’ve also been busy since I talked about
them last time and have some interesting updates, which I’ll get to in just a minute. If one or more of these companies is successful
at driving down the cost per watt of small wind turbines for more residential and suburban
settings, there’s a huge market they can tap into. “The traditional thinking in the wind
industry, which is totally valid, is bigger is better because the bigger the swept area,
the more power you can put out … which makes all the sense in the world. You know, that's a lot of physics, but at
the same time it does create a limited market to some level as far as applications … We
think there's a lot of behind the meter opportunity by leveraging these large rooftops to create
power. You're not as beholden to, you know, transmission
requirements and you can get the power to where it's needed.” “But it's virtually an untapped market
right now, so it's not like … 90 percent of residential areas already have wind turbines,
and so then you're trying to convince them to get rid of that and get a new one. People are looking for them … People are
waiting for the right solution to come out, and so we hope that we are the ones that fill
that gap. People are looking for it, they're not necessarily
moving on the bad solutions, or the inferior solutions, I shouldn't say that, the inferior
solutions. You know, they're just kind of waiting because
they don't know what to do.” David said something very similar. “If you think about onsite generation,
what are folks really trying to achieve? They're trying to maximize
their on site generation. And so, I think that's what really resonates
with folks that we talk to every day all around the world, is that this technology allows
Uh, an operator or owner of a building, um, were suitable to create
this incremental generation, uh, which can really move the needle and be quite meaningful.” If a homeowner or building owner crunches
the numbers and sees a path to maximizing their energy generation and savings by layering
in wind turbines along with solar, small scale, distributed wind generation could finally
see its…day in the sun. This is where it gets interesting. Since I last covered Aeromine, there’s been
some updates on what they’re doing. The company has had a pilot project running
on top of a BASF building for about a year and a half with great results, and it’s
planning to expand in 2024. “We have a series of approximately 10
pilot projects that are actually in production right now and are starting to roll out in
the next two quarters. So you'll see a lot more Aeromines on the
rooftops, both the US and Europe, in the next six months. And then we are in the final stages of what
we call “design for manufacturing” of our mass market product,
which should be introduced late in 2024.” Meanwhile, Harmony Turbines is collaborating
with two universities in the company’s home state of Pennsylvania: It just finished a
study that involved receiving feedback from Bucknell University, and it also has additional
work being done with Penn State University. Harmony is also making a splash across the
pond at Northumbria University in the UK. Bucknell’s study helped the Harmony team
do full scale testing of its current design, and Penn State has been doing water tank testing
for clustering effects. That’s basically determining how to group
turbines together to maximize production. In horizontal axis wind turbines, that usually
means having to space them far apart, as the wake created by the turbines
upwind can dramatically impact those behind it. What’s interesting is that for vertical
axis wind turbines, that’s not the case. In fact, studies are showing that grouping
them closer together can actually amplify their production. Again, this is about turning the disadvantage
of dirty, chaotic wind into a positive. Chris and Cheryl spoke to me at length about
how they’re continuing iteration on their scoop design and will be starting to gather
a lot of data next year. Like I said, they’ve got a really interesting
approach that I’m keen to see play out, but they’re very early days. One thing I LOVE about Harmony Turbines as
a company is how they’re sharing their journey of development out in the open. Most companies don’t do this. They have a website and a YouTube channel
with videos they’re publishing on a regular basis. So, if you’d like to see what it takes to develop a technology like
this, and why it usually takes more time than you might think, it's awesome
stuff, you really need to follow them. And let me know if you’d like me to do a
deeper dive on their approach (or any other companies in this area). While smaller scale wind technology still
isn’t here for homes just yet, there’s a lot of interesting developments in the works. It doesn’t seem like we’ll have to wait
much longer to find out which way the wind is blowing. But what do you think about the future of
residential wind? Jump into the comments and let me know. And be sure to check out my follow up podcast
Still TBD where we'll be discussing some of your feedback. Thanks to all of my patrons, who get ad free
versions of every video … and a big welcome to new Supporter + member, Dan Liese, I hope I pronounced your name right. Your support really helps us to keep delivering
you these videos every week. If you’d like to support the channel and
get in on early videos, check out the link in the description. I’ll see you in the next one.
