Conscious Choice: Elegant Technology

August 2005

Elegant Technology

By Bil Becker and Lesleigh Lippitt

A sandy path leads you from the Humboldt Park field house to a stone bridge arched across the sparkling lagoon. As the mid-day sun hangs lazily over lively windblown trees south of the lagoon, you see a brilliant-white, DNA-like form spinning against the trees and sky. What is this, you ask, an avant garde piece of art?

No. This is an urban windmill — a windmill without propellers, a dancing wind generator working with adjoining solar panels to provide clean electricity to power pumps that refresh the Humboldt Park creek and lagoon, creating a cool urban oasis in the middle of this West Side neighborhood.

Dubbed the Windside Model WS-4C, this urban wind turbine is rated at 1.2 kilowatts, weighs 2,000 pounds and produces about 600 kilowatt hours per year in low-speed park winds. At 3.5 feet wide and 13 feet high, it sits atop a pole base that’s about as tall as a street lamp. The wind turbine from Oy Windside Productions Ltd. in Finland (www.windside.com) was invented by artist/engineer Risto Joutsiniemi. It emerged from his range of artful kinetic wind sculptures designed to stand before new buildings of contemporary design, adding curves and organic forms to most buildings’ banal straight lines and relentless angles.

The Windside wind turbine arrived at Humboldt Park through the initiative of the Chicago Park District and its general contractor, Schaefges Brothers Inc., a Chicago construction firm, which teamed up with Neway Argaw of Denver, an experienced designer of combined wind and solar electrical systems.

Argaw developed a grid-intertied (surplus power is sent back to the power company) energy plan that paired the 1.5-kw Windside with a 2,000-watt solar electric array. This created a hybrid renewable energy system of perfect partners — wind and sun. The system creates over 3,000 kwh of renewable energy per year, and offsets the park’s nighttime lighting and daytime water pumping costs. The project was completed in August, 2004, after 18 months. Windside wind turbines can be found from Chicago to the Antarctic and from Lapland to the Pacific Ocean.

Urban Wind Need

Wind technologies and small wind systems, designed for city use, have been needed for a long time. Globally, nearly 3.5 billion people live in crowded urban areas. Small wind systems are those that work best as “distributed power” producers. “Distributed power” means these small wind systems add power building by building, just like rooftop solar systems do. This networked, neighborly form of power is in contrast to large, megawatt wind generators connected to overhead powerlines sprouting up on wind farms in fields, knolls and shorelines worldwide. These large windfarms imitate centralized power plants and may soon have coal plants built next door.

Centralized power has been the paradigm up to now. But East Coast blackouts have made us all increasingly aware of centralized grid node vulnerability. The need for distributed power — literally for each neighborhood or building — is becoming clearer.

Modern urban turbine design got a boost from researchers such as Douglas R. Coonley who, back in 1974, mapped out the wind flow patterns around buildings for partial fulfillment of his requirement for a degree of Master of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (diagram below). Coonley demonstrated in wind tunnels that buildings can capture and accelerate wind through building-mounted wind generators. Buildings become not barriers, but funnels for engaging wind energy.

Some of the machines in this new generation of wind turbines have been configured to take advantage of the wind flow around buildings and updrafts created by heat from the buildings and pavement. This makes the smaller propeller-less turbines a viable power source where they’re needed the most, in the heart of the city. These new wind turbines are efficient in city winds that gust from all directions simultaneously. And by harnessing these urban winds and combining that power with another renewable technology, such as solar panels, some renewable energy advocates say zero-energy buildings that can exist completely off the grid are possible in the heart of urban areas. These same zero-energy buildings, by constantly adding their “distributed power” energy surpluses during “peak load” times, have proven to be the best forms of grid-balancing during potential grid brownout or blackout conditions. For one investment in building-related distributed power, the utility company gets network stability for the community-owned power grid.

Bil Becker is an associate professor of Industrial Design at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and President/CEO of Becker Renewable Energy. Lesleigh Lippitt is co-founder of Becker Renewable Energy.

For More Information:

Ropatec, vertical-axis two-bladed machine using a novel startup device, www.ropatec.com.

Turby, vertically spinning three-bladed rotor with curving Darrieus airfoils, www.turby.com.

Recommend this page to a friend

Top Ten pages recommended to friends: