“Without the stress of holding up 80-meter metal blades by one end, VAWTs can potentially become much larger.” “Vertical-axis turbines…experience a constant gravitational force, always in the same direction,” he wrote. Maurizio Collu of Cranfield University’s Offshore Renewable Energy Center thinks vertical axis wind turbines (VAWTs) are the answer. Despite the energy that’s lost in transport and conversion, large turbines are still worth our while.īut there’s a limit to how big horizontal-axis turbines can get, and once we reach that limit, we’ll need a different solution. As noted above, these turbines have gotten huge, because bigger means better when it comes to efficiency. The turbines we’re used to seeing have horizontal axes like windmills, their blades spin between parallel and perpendicular to the ground. Marketing Manager Sofia Garcia Enciso added, “We want to motivate people to become ‘prosumers,’ or producers and consumers-you produce your own energy then consume it.” The virtues of vertical “It’s the whole idea of houses becoming smarter, people generating what they need in their own homes,” Juarez said. The goal is for each turbine to produce the same amount of energy its owner is using, or more. Upon being set up and plugged in, they immediately start to feed the grid, and can be operated off-grid as well. “The solution is to produce the energy where you’re going to consume it.”Īnd that’s what Nemoi turbines do. “You lose up to 40 percent of that energy from its point of generation to its point of use, because you need to transport it, store it, and convert it,” Juarez said. And while those massive horizontal-axis turbines are highly efficient, the energy they’re generating still has to be transported back to end users. That’s why we see wind farms extending across sprawling fields in the middle of nowhere. You can’t just plop one of those down in the middle of your typical town or city.
GE’s 1.5 MW model, for example, has blades 116 feet long, making the spinning blades’ diameter wider than the wingspan of a Boeing 747.
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He explained that conventional turbines require high wind speeds, plus they’re big, heavy, and hard to install and maintain.
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“We started wondering why there isn’t a wind turbine on every rooftop, and we started thinking about how to solve the problems with existing turbines,” he said. Wind is just as abundant as sunlight, but it’s been harder to adopt on a local scale, and that’s part of the problem Nemoi’s creators are trying to solve.ĭuring a visit to Semtive’s office in Mountain View, Juarez told me about his motivation for building Nemoi, and his vision of decentralized, user-generated clean energy. This has already started to happen with solar, as evidenced by the panels you may see on your neighbors’ roofs. To really make renewables widespread, though, they need to be more accessible. Nemoi was created by energy startup Semtive, and with great timing-the International Energy Agency’s 2016 medium-term forecast for renewables predicts that by 2021, 60 percent of the world’s energy will come from renewables, and between now and then, wind turbines will go up at a rate of 2.5 every hour. It’s also made of 95 percent recyclable aluminum, can be quickly assembled by one person, and is locally manufactured.
According to its creator, Semtive Energy CEO Ignacio Juarez, a Nemoi turbine can power a four-person household at wind speeds of just 10-13 miles per hour. The spinning is constant, but completely silent, and it doesn’t look fast enough to be generating much energy.īut appearances can be deceiving. A white and silver metallic structure about the size of a garden shrub, Nemoi has three vertical blades that spin carousel-like around a central axis. The first time you see a Nemoi wind turbine, you may not realize it’s a turbine at all.
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