Aeromine Rooftop Wind. Static. Silent. 50% more power than Solar PV. What's not to like?

As you can probably tell from my accent, I live in the UK, which is one of the

wind

iest countries in Europe. It is a meteorological advantage that has allowed us to deploy no less than two thousand five hundred huge

wind

turbines around the coast of our small island with a combined generating capacity of almost 13 gigawatts providing up to 13% of Britain's electricity. It's not just us, I'm sure you know that. Wind energy is one of the fastest growing renewable energy sources in many parts of the world. The laws of physics and fluid dynamics, including the fact that wind speeds are generally faster at higher altitudes and that doubling wind speed increases its energy eight-fold, mean that wind turbines are getting bigger and bigger.

more

to capture that energy and increase its efficiency.

But it's quite an expensive business, with the world's largest turbines now costing

more

than $12 million to manufacture and install. Massive installations like these also, quite rightly, require extensive regulatory and planning permissions before they can be carried out, and typically require some form of financial backing and guarantees from national governments to prevent them from becoming very expensive white elephants in the future. . For all these reasons, wind generation today remains almost exclusively the responsibility of large producers and centralized state or national energy networks. However, that fact hasn't stopped a small but growing number of intrepid innovators from trying to harness the

power

of wind at the micro-generation level.

The potential prize of cheap and efficient off-grid electricity has produced all sorts of weird and wonderful designs in recent years, one or two of which we've reviewed on this channel. And now there's a new kid on the block with a radical new roof-mounted design that has no visible moving parts, makes no noise and can be used in combination with

solar

panels, on the same roof, to provide a much more consistent experience. and continues. flow of electrical energy to the building below. So how does that work? Hello and welcome to Just Have a Think. The innovation I am referring to has been developed by a new American company called Aeromine Technologies.

The design is truly the culmination of a lifetime of experience in the wind industry for its inventor, Carsten Westergard. Carsten began his career as a wind technician 28 years ago and most recently held senior executive positions at Vestas North America and LM Wind. He developed this particular technological advance in 2016 together with Sandia National Labs, affiliated with the United States Department of Energy. I recently met with Aeromine co-founder and CEO David Asarnow via Zoom to learn more about the system and the impact it could have on the wind energy market. One of the main advantages the Aeromine design has over almost all other previous microwind

power

generation systems is that it has no exposed rotating blades or fins.

We'll take a closer look at how it actually works a little later in the video, but one of the big advantages of having no visible moving parts is that the unit runs virtually

silent

ly, and that overcomes one of the main objections raised. versus existing roof-mounted wind turbine technologies. It also means that the construction of an Aeromine unit does not require advanced and expensive materials such as carbon fiber, making it relatively inexpensive to produce. Additionally, it has been designed to be disassembled very easily during shipping. This keeps costs even lower for regular customers, but also means that these units could be economically deployed in remote locations, either as part of an emergency disaster recovery or as a full-time installation.

The genius of the design lies in two main elements. The first is the shape of the

static

fins on the top section. They are very similar to the components that can be found on Formula One racing cars, which are there to optimize wind flow and aerodynamic interactions throughout the vehicle to keep it firmly attached to the track and moving as quickly as possible. Carsten Westergard and his team applied those same fluid dynamics principles to arrive at the optimal shape for this particular application. Static benefits exploit the phenomenon known as the Venturi effect, named after an 18th-century Italian physicist named Giovanni Batista Venturi, who first discovered it.

What Venturi discovered was that if a fluid is forced to flow through a narrow section of a pipe, its flow rate increases and the pressure of the fluid drops. Fluids will always move from a high pressure region to a low pressure region in an attempt to equalize the overall system. It's kind of like the shape of an airplane wing provides lift. Aeromine takes advantage of this phenomenon by placing its units on the edge of a building and facing the direction of the prevailing wind annually. At the top of a building wall there is a significant increase in wind speed as air flowing up the wall is pressed onto the roof.

In a building with a flat roof, this effect is especially pronounced. The

static

aerofoils of the Aeromine unit have been optimized to create a negative pressure that draws in rising air even more quickly. So we have strong airflow through our unit. All that is needed now is to place an internal propeller generator in that airflow and connect a pair of wires to it to produce an electrical current that can be fed directly into the building system. It is really a very elegant and simple design that contradicts many years of research and development in computer simulations and wind tunnels to arrive at the perfect shape.

And the fact that Aeromine units run along the edge of a roof means that the rest of the roof is still available for a

solar

PV installation. Therefore, the building operator can potentially use two completely complementary technologies to achieve much more consistent electricity generation over a longer period of each day. As solar energy begins to wane during the afternoon, the Aeromine system can continue to supply power well into the evening. And if the

rooftop

installations are associated with a battery energy storage system in the building's engine room, then there is the possibility of operating almost completely independently of the electrical grid.

The units themselves are approximately 3 meters or 10 feet tall and rated at 5 kilowatts. That means a single Aeromine unit has the same capacity as about 16 standard solar panels, but takes up much less space. And because they have no moving parts and operate

silent

ly, they have minimal environmental and visual impact, meaning planning consent should also be much easier to achieve. In spring 2022, Aeromine installed its first commercial pilot in the Detroit area in partnership with German industrial giant BASF. BASF had apparently been searching for an on-site power generation solution that could work across its extensive international portfolio for years.

They worked closely with Aeromine, holding weekly conversations to resolve any issues and ensure the pilot installation was a success. If the numbers add up, then the partnership with BASF could represent a big opportunity for Aeromine to gain traction in Europe and elsewhere. The original focus of Aeromone's technology was the millions of large, flat-roofed industrial buildings that dot the landscapes of the United States and most other countries around the world, but David Asarnow told me they've also had interest in part of multifamily developers and owners who are really prioritizing on-site power generation for all the low-carbon independence and sustainability reasons we hear so much about in the news these days.

Those developers may see an opportunity to reduce their peak energy costs a bit, and of course most of them are now planning their systems to be able to cope with the rapid deployments of electric vehicle infrastructure that looks set to grow very quickly in the next years. next years. Now, as always, I suspect many of you good people are eager to see the cold, hard numbers, like the levelized cost of electricity and all that wonderful stuff. At this early stage in its evolution, the company is not yet releasing that information, but David Asarnow confirmed that the BASF unit's real-world performance has been remarkably consistent with the efficiencies and costs produced by its computer simulations, and Consider that once they reach large-scale production, Aeromine units will be cheaper than solar panels and will produce 50% more energy for the same cost.

That's something I'll obviously be keeping an eye on in the coming months and we may come back to take another look at Aeromine in a year or so to review how they're progressing. In the meantime, this looks like a very promising technology that eliminates many of the problems faced by other small microwind generation solutions, so I'll be interested to see

what

you think. Could this be a real game changer or do you see issues we haven't discussed here? If you have experience in the small wind power generation system industry, then maybe you have some knowledge that you can share with all of us.

If so, as always, the place to do so is in the comments section below. That's all for this week. If you found this video useful and informative, please give us a "Like" and hit the subscribe button if you haven't already, and if you want to actively participate in the channel's content guide and get exclusive monthly content from me, then you can do so by joining the channel's amazing team of Patreon supporters who make these videos possible. And if you're interested in learning more about smart, sustainable technologies like this, I think you'll enjoy this video too. As always, thank you very much for watching.

Have a great week and remember to give it some thought. See you next week.