Why Small Wind Can’t Work

Here’s a renewable energy investment opportunity that I recommend you avoid: wind flower turbines.  As shown in the video, the inventor claims that small wind will eventually takes its place in the constellation of renewable energy solutions, along with rooftop solar PV and the rest.

He claims that the principal impediment thus far has been technological, and while that’s partially correct, there are immutable facts of physics and meteorology that doom small wind to failure:

• The wind conditions at low altitudes are terrible.

• The swept area (that governs the amount of theoretically available wind power) is proportionate to the square of the blade length, meaning that small is bad.

• All this means that the turbines themselves need to be very inexpensive if their levelized cost of energy is to be competitive, and cheap is the enemy of quality.

You’ll want to pass on this one.