Raphael Thys
Photo by Sander Weeteling on Unsplash
We are currently trapped in a decades-long repentance for our climate sins. Every element of society must be modified or revolutionised to stop our heinous actions against Mother Earth from persisting. Otherwise, we risk wreaking biblical levels of environmental karma onto the entire globe. One industry that is feeling the lion’s share of this pressure is the energy sector, given they have to ditch the old coal and gas power plants and switch to nuclear, geothermal, solar, and wind power. But while these technologies are better than fossil fuels, they are far from perfect. Take offshore wind power, for example. It is surprisingly expensive, challenging to maintain, hard to create more powerful turbines, causes deadly havoc with wildlife, and requires vast areas of land for development, blocking the way for birds, whales, and even humans. Fortunately, a new turbine design from World Wide Wind promises to rectify this problem and make wind a near-perfect eco-friendly energy solution.
Before we dive into this new turbine design, we first need to fully understand the drawbacks of our current turbines. You see, the giant white triple-bladed windmill design we currently use seems excellent from the outside due to its impressive efficiency. It achieves this by making use of high-speed turbine blades and lots of complex gears. But these fast blades cause a massive amount of turbulence, which means any nearby downwind turbines will become far less efficient. In order to solve this, the turbines need to be spaced out, which is why offshore wind farms tend to sprawl out and take up vast areas of sea. Because these blades spin so fast that birds can’t figure out where they are, wind turbines kill millions of birds each year.
Photo by Nicholas Doherty on Unsplash
However, this high speed turbine causes further engineering challenges. For example, the gearing and high-speed generators needed to work with such a turbine are complex and expensive. Some even require cooling. The turbine also needs to be pointed into the wind to work correctly, which makes it incredibly challenging to make these turbines bigger and more powerful. The current largest wind turbine in the world has a blade diameter of 242 metres and can produce a massive 16 MW, which sounds enormous, but in an ideal world, it would be far bigger to minimise the number of turbines in a farm, decreasing operational costs and area usage.
This is where World Wide Wind comes in with its contra-rotating vertical turbine. This bizarre-looking technology solves all of the issues we currently have with wind power by tearing up the turbine rulebook and starting from scratch.
World Wide Wind contra-rotating vertical turbine — World Wide Wind
So how does it work? Well, let me explain.
The turbine is anchored to the sea floor with and floats. At its base, metres below the waterline, is the generator. This heavy object acts like the keel of a yacht and stops the giant turbine from falling over. But it still leans over in the wind. This is because the blades of the counter-rotating turbines are at an angle to the tower, so when tilted over, the side facing the wind has its blade pointed vertically, and the opposite side has it pointed horizontally.
Diagram of the new turbine — World Wide Wind
These blades and their counter-rotating nature have some remarkable side effects. Firstly, the blade can be made to function efficiently at low speeds. Think of it as being designed for grunt and not for speed. This, in turn, means that the generator can have direct connection to both turbines with no gears or cooling system needed, making the entire system far simpler.
So that is how it works, but why does that make it better?
Well, because it needs no complex gearing, cooling, challenging anchoring setup, or alignment system to point the blades in the right direction, it is far simpler and, in theory, should be far cheaper. This will make offshore wind easier and quicker to scale up, allowing it to quickly replace outdated energy sources without bankrupting a country. It also means that maintenance should be much cheaper, firstly as a result of there being less to go wrong, but also due to the fact that there is less to repair if it does.
Windfarms can be far more dense — World Wide Wind
Then there is the reduced wake. These turbines can be placed so close together (while not impacting efficiency downwind) that four times more can be installed in a given area compared to current turbines. This means that we can construct our massive gigawatt-scale offshore wind farms without impeding whale migratory routes, fisheries, or marine ecosystems. To put a cherry on top of this cake, the blade will also spin so slowly that bird strikes will be a thing of the past.
Finally, while the first of these turbines will be of a similar size to our current ones, this new design has the potential to become massive. Without changing anything about the design itself, World Wide Wind reckons they can be built up to 400m tall and produce a whopping 40 MW of power from a single unit, making them a massive 2.5 times more powerful than anything we currently have. Again, the cost and area saving advantages from these giant turbines will be immense. But even the smaller version of the contra-turbine can have an advantage, as unlike current turbines, they can be made with recycled materials, yet again making them cheaper and more eco-friendly.
Sadly, we don’t yet know when this incredible concept will be put into production, but if World Wide Wind can get this amazing technology off the ground and into action, it will cause a revolution in wind power, making it super affordable and significantly reducing the harmful impact we have on this precious Earth. With current international affairs and the looming climate doom on the horizon, let’s hope this comes to fruition sooner rather than later.