Revolutionary Wind Turbine Wall to Provide Green Energy Everywhere
A wall made of innovative wind turbines is set to revolutionize the way green energy is produced, aiming to seamlessly integrate into public spaces and enable decentralized electricity generation.
The current trend in wind turbines leans towards larger windmills with rotor blade diameters reaching nearly 300 meters, making them massive structures that can generate significant amounts of energy. However, these colossal structures cannot be installed everywhere. Taking a different approach, the start-up Airiva is developing wind turbines that can be set up virtually anywhere in the form of a wall. This wall consists of multiple vertical rotors rotating around a vertical axis, producing energy silently while blending effortlessly into public spaces.
The concept of such a wind wall was first introduced by Airiva in 2021, with designer and co-founder Joe Doucet testing 16 different wind turbines with vertical rotors, three of which made it to wind tunnel tests. Among them, a helical turbine design proved to be the most efficient model, now being developed into a commercial product. A unit of this wind wall with 8 rotors is expected to produce around 2,200 kWh of energy per year, equivalent to half the average consumption of a four-person household in Austria. Despite its production capacity, the module measures only 4.2 meters in length and 2.1 meters in height.
The modular nature of these vertical wind turbines allows for easy scalability, enabling them to be placed almost anywhere and provide on-site energy production. Airiva aims to boost decentralized electricity generation with this concept, envisioning wind walls along highways, airports, or simply on building rooftops. While commercial deployment is still in the works, the company hopes to install functional prototypes in pilot projects by the end of this year, with the possibility of selling the first wind walls by 2025.