Urban wind turbines

It’s hard for dense metropolitan areas like New York City to go green. There is no room for say, massive two-hundred-foot-tall wind turbines. Or is there?

Well, there is on a small scale. New York City recently began mounting apartment-sized wind turbines that look a lot like table fans onto their affordable housing complexes. Supplying power directly to homes, the small turbines typically cut electricity costs in half.

Cleveland State University scientist Dr. Majid Rashidi (pictured left) is taking it one step further: he wants to replace the water towers that grace many of NYC’s older buildings with a wind-turbine silo. The logic is New Yorkers are already accustomed to the roof-top structures, making the retro-fit the ideal opportunity to turn the concrete jungle green.

One of the major problems preventing wind turbines from being truly effective in urban areas is the difficulty in harnessing the variable and unstable wind speeds. That’s why Rashidi’s design is generating so much interest.

The silo-like structure containing four wind turbines actually accelerates the wind hitting the turbines and allows them to generate power more consistently than one of the more typical mini airplane propeller type turbines.

And while the building-mounted wind turbine won’t exactly be winning any wind-generating awards, producing only about 8 kilowatts per hour, it is still a gust in the right direction, saving a potential 600,000 tonnes of CO2 annually.

And on the smog-choked streets of New York City, that’s not going to blow past unnoticed.