Aeromine wind energy system

[Paul Nuttall]

What do people think of this system?

https://www.aerominetechnologies.com/

Aeromine’s patented aerodynamic design captures and amplifies building airflow in wind speeds as low as 5 m.p.h., similar to the airfoils on a race car. Unlike turbines that require rotating rotor blades and many moving parts, making them prone to maintenance issues, the motionless and durable Aeromine solution generates more energy in less space.

Aeromine is designed for installation on buildings with large flat rooftops such as :

Warehouses and Distribution Centers

Manufacturing Facilities

Office Buildings

Multi-Family Residential Developments

Big Box Retail

[Pdf27]

It's got all the problems of a small wind turbine system, with a few new ones added:

1. It's literally got the same number of moving parts and more blades than a normal wind turbine, they're just hidden in a duct at the bottom.
2. "Generates electricity at low wind speed" is a bad thing. There's very little energy to capture in low-speed wind, and the trade-offs to capture it typically mean that you can't capture the energy in high speed wind - where there is a lot of it to be had. It often also means that the machine is less robust at high wind speeds.
3. Subset of this - it's a 5kW system at the rated wind speed (typically very heavy wind conditions). Rooftop wind capacity factor is typically about 5%, meaning that one of those will give an average of about 250W over the course of a year. That works out at about 2MWh per year - the same as as a 2kW solar system in the UK, 1.4kW in Texas. That overstates the value - most businesses use power during the day as that's when their staff are present, the A/C is on, etc.
4. Solar PV is really cheap right now and scales up very nicely (the factory I work in is installing 1MW on the roof at the moment). The amount of solar required to match the annual generation of one of these costs about £2k in a big installation of the type they show. They're going to really, really struggle to get one of those built and installed for that price - there's quite a lot to build, and they need a proper crane to get it on the roof rather than a few pulleys.
5. Putting anything on a roof is problematic in the first place (safe access is difficult) - it's sort of OK for solar because the panels should be maintenance-free for several decades. Not true for a wind turbine - the rotor is a moving part, so the bearings need regular greasing, etc.
6. The website basically has some CAD animations and virtually nothing else beyond the biographies and LinkedIn profiles of the whole company (they literally have one engineer and a board of directors).

[PLB]

They are being a little disingenuous with their no moving parts line.
But, it seems to me that a vertical axis wind turbine is better suited to this sort of on site generation than the horizontal variety.
Now, whether or not Aeromines' is better than the one Robert Murry-Smith has produced here is another story.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LteWS7O ... rray-Smith

Paul

[Pdf27]

They are being a little disingenuous with their no moving parts line.
But, it seems to me that a vertical axis wind turbine is better suited to this sort of on site generation than the horizontal variety.
Now, whether or not Aeromines' is better than the one Robert Murry-Smith has produced here is another story.

That kind of misses the point - wind turbines are inherently not suited to small scale, distributed generation. They've got relatively large overheads and the available wind resource at rooftop level is execrable. Anybody on-grid who wants to invest a small amount of money in wind is far better off putting the money in something like https://rippleenergy.com than they are building their own wind turbine.