Corkscrew Wind Turbine Now Powering Cleveland Indians Stadium

k&r

get rid of their racist name.

They do not, as far as I know redirect flow towards turbines at each end as this one does, but rather turn the vertical axis it'self which is geared directly to a generator.

http://www.helixwind.com/en/product.php

There are others, I just happened to remember the name of this one.

Well, similar to those.

I am curious about smaller ones that can be installed at home.


I searched for something like "corkscrew wind turbines" and found that story.

http://www.urbangreenenergy.com/uge-products

The smaller ones look affordable, as to how well they work, your guess is as good as mine. The literature looks good but I don't know anybody that has tried one to ask how well they work.

I do know you should do a wind survey to find out where on your property it should be placed, also if there is not enough wind it may not be a good value.

I once had visions of a mixture of solar and wind that could take me off the grid (grid=coal mostly), perhaps my money and health will return and I will get a chance to engineer something along those lines.

"“The easiest way to explain it is this: there are two wind turbines hanging on both sides of the spiral,” Dr. Rashidi says. “When air passes by the spiral, it gently deflects the wind towards the turbines to power them. If the spiral were not there, the air molecules would typically miss the turbines entirely.”
Source: Clean Technica (http://s.tt/19hFH)

Rashidi's description is ambiguous because he used the adjective "both"; it would have been more clear if he'd said "each". The photo confirms that there are two turbines on one side so it is pretty clear the unit has 4 small HAWTs.

It is very unlikely you will ever see this design in widespread use.

100 watt light bulbs going...maybe the headline should say "powering one of the bathrooms"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilowatt_hour


^snip^

Confusion of kilowatt hours and kilowatts

The terms power and energy are frequently confused. Power is the rate at which energy is generated or consumed. Power therefore has the unit watts, which is joules per second. A unit of energy is kilowatt hour.

For example, when a light bulb with a power rating of 100W is turned on for one hour, the energy used is 100 watt hours (W·h), 0.1 kilowatt hour, or 360 kJ. This same amount of energy would light a 40-watt bulb for 2.5 hours, or a 50-watt bulb for 2 hours. A power station would be rated in multiples of watts, but its annual energy sales would be in multiples of watt hours. A kilowatt hour is the amount of energy equivalent to a steady power of 1 kilowatt running for 1 hour, or 3.6 MJ.

Power units measure the rate of energy per unit time. Many compound units for rates explicitly mention units of time, for example, miles per hour, kilometers per hour, dollars per hour. Kilowatt hours are a product of power and time, not a rate of change of power with time. Terms such as watts per hour are often misused. Watts per hour (W/h) is a unit of a change of power per hour. It might be used to characterize the ramp-up behavior of power plants. For example, a power plant that reaches a power output of 1 MW from 0 MW in 15 minutes has a ramp-up rate of 4 MW/h. Hydroelectric power plants have a very high ramp-up rate, which makes them particularly useful in peak load and emergency situations.

Major energy production or consumption is often expressed as terawatt hours(TWh) for a given period that is often a calendar year or financial year. One terawatt hour is equal to a sustained power of approximately 114 megawatts for a period of one year.





As you can see a 100 watt light bulb uses 0.1 kilowatt hour per hour. So a couple dozen would use 2.4 kilowatt hours per hour. Even if we round up to 2.5 we still need to divide that by 25,000 to get the 10,000 hours that those bulbs can be run on wind power.


With 365.25 days in a year and 24 hours in a day that means there are only 8766 hours in the year. Since you could run them for 10,000 hours a year that means that burning them 24/7/365 would still only use up 87.66% of the wind power being generated.

There are only 81 home games in a baseball season and they tend to last just a few hours. We can round that up to 5 hours per game just for convenience.

The stadium could also be used for concerts, and other events, so lets double that. Call it 160 days of usage times five hours a day for a nice even 800 hours a year. Now since each bulb uses 0.1 kWh I come up with 312.5 100 watt bulbs that can be run off wind power {(25000 / 0.1) / 800}.

More than a couple dozen, a few hundred (unless my math is off).




Edit To Add: Welcome to DU !!!

If I make a mistake, please point it out:
I will stick to whole numbers and avoid scientific notation to keep it a bit more easy
to follow,


25,000 kWh = 25,000,000 Wh

there are 8766 hours per year so

25000000 Wh/year is

25000000/8766 Wh/h, or

~2850 watts. If they're 100 watt bulbs, it looks like 28 1/2 of them would use up
those 2850 watts. My original guesstimate of a couple dozen was a bit optimistic.



edit to add I should probably have made it more clear I was figuring based on the lights left on 24/7/365

I think running them 24/7/365 when the stadium only has 81 home games a season is a bit of a stretch but I can see where you are coming from.


I am going to go back and copy a little bit more of the article for you.

^snip^

While the new corkscrew wind turbine, projected to generate 25,000 kilowatt hours of electricity per year, isn’t expected to make a huge dent in the stadium’s need for power from other sources, that’s not its main purpose.

“It is an educational statement for the younger generation,” Dr. Rashidi says. “What the ballpark is doing is to have kids from elementary school through high school see that we are being innovative and trying to design something that can have an impact on the economy around the country.”





I think that explains things better than I can.

that seemed to suggest it was some kind of major contributor to the energy needs of the place. I looked back at the 2011 electric bills for my small residence (totally on the grid, member of a co-op with cost well under a dime per kWh)...we converted about 20,000 kWh of generated electricity into heat. My small contribution to global warming...
shrug

You were trying not to double-count the thousands multipliers, and overdid it.

thanks

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/765563842/Indians-install-wind-turbine-at-ballpark.html