By Jennifer Kho, earth2tech – June 3, 2009

If you’ve ever walked through a skyscraper-laden city on a windy day, you know how big buildings can intensify the gales, creating wind tunnels that accelerate the gusts so that they blow off hats and flip up skirts. Now a 3-year-old Akron, Ohio-based startup called Green Energy Technologies wants to use that same wind-tunnel effect to generate small-wind power more efficiently.

The company has developed a 60-kilowatt, five-blade turbine that comes with what it calls a shroud, which looks like a sort of shallow metal funnel. The shroud creates a wind-tunnel effect in front of the blades, amplifying the wind velocity by a factor of two — so that a 5 mph wind that enters the shroud reaches 10 mph by the time it hits the blade — allowing the system to harness even low-speed winds and ultimately produce more electricity from them.

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This entry was posted Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009 at 8:36 pm and is filed under Energy, News. Both comments and pings are currently closed.