Mike Barnard recently wrote about Airloom device on
AirLoom makes the same mistakes that are repeated over and over and over in wind generation. In fact, they make the same mistakes in virtually exactly the same way as a failed wind generation innovator from the early 1980s, Transpower. […]
What is it that AirLoom and Transpower are doing? Well, instead of putting the wind generator up where the air is stronger, they are keeping it closer to the ground because that’s cheaper. Except that the wind is stronger and less turbulent further from the ground, and energy in the wind is a function of the cube of the wind velocity. Small increases in wind velocity increase energy return tremendously, and AirLoom says, “The heck with that!”
This is similar also to John Dabiri’s schools of counter-rotating vertical axis wind turbine fish which I first assessed over a decade ago now, including a lengthy back and forth with the MacArthur Genius Grant winner. It doesn’t matter how cheap and simple a wind generator is, unless it’s in stronger winds, it’s just not going to make much electricity. At least Dabiri found and attempted to exploit a new effect, but AirLoom has nothing going for it. […]
AirLoom’s blades forego every single one of those advantages. The blades in the front of the device are close to the ground, so there’s more turbulence. They are behind the track and posts, so there’s more turbulence. They can’t pivot into the wind because the posts are fixed to the ground, so only a fraction of the blades in any device are well aligned to the wind. The blades on the downwind side of the loop are flying through dirty air from the blades in the front of the loop. And the friction from the cable running on the inside of the track will suck a bunch of the energy that remains. […]
The prior art Mike Barnard mentioned is on
His arguments match those of our expert @dougselsam concerning the evaluation of “innovations” in wind energy.