Wind Turbine Placement Produces Tenfold Power Increase
The power output of wind farms can be increased by an order of magnitude - at least tenfold - simply by optimizing the placement of turbines on a given plot of land, say researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) who have been conducting a unique field study at an experimental two-acre wind farm in northern Los Angeles County. John Dabiri, a professor of aeronautics and bioengineering, and his colleagues conducted field tests at the Field Laboratory for Optimized Wind Energy (FLOWE), which houses 24 ten-meter-tall, 1.2-meter-wide vertical-axis wind turbines (VAWTs) - turbines that have vertical rotors and look like eggbeaters sticking out of the ground.
Transcript
00:00:06 [Music] my name is John deiri I'm a professor of Aeronautics and bioengineering at Caltech one of the benefits of being a professor at Caltech is that we have an interdisciplinary environment in my particular case I spent several years studying fish swimming in the ocean but the fact that colleagues around me were thinking about problems related to
00:00:26 aerodynamics and related to wind turbines always had me thinking about ways that I could apply my knowledge to that particular area our work on fish schooling showed us that groups of fish can actually swim more effectively than the individuals would by themselves similarly we took that inspiration to show that the individual wind turbines can actually be improved in their
00:00:49 performance by placing them in Arrangements in which they can interact with their neighbors Flo is the Caltech field laboratory for optimized wind energy located north of the CC campus in the analou valley where we have 24 vertical axis wind turbines which we can test under various configurations and also under various wind conditions at the end of the day our
00:01:12 goal is to determine configurations that can generate the most electricity from the wind often times the turbines at the front are doing quite well but those in the middle of the array or toward the back are not performing it's one thing to have a theory on paper or even to prove it out in a wind tunnel it's another thing to really really show that this works in the in the real world and
00:01:33 so the field laboratory allows us to test these new Concepts in real wind environments I assigned a couple of students who were in one of my classes to study this problem mathematically at first to create some models to predict how this uh fish inspired Wind Farm could perform relative to the status quo and they came back with predictions of 10-fold improvements at first I told
00:01:56 them to go back and try it again because I assumed that they made a mistake but but in fact that's what the prediction said and that result was so compelling that we decided to start the field laboratory to study this in the real world and it's been very rewarding to see that those predictions are actually borne out in the field we've designed these wind turbine farms in a way that
00:02:16 the wind direction actually doesn't matter this is important for wind farm sites where the winds can change from the Santa anas coming from one direction to the typical prevailing winds from the West we've also tried to optimize the rotation direction so not all of the turbines will rotate clockwise from a top view that design concept actually came from our inspiration in fish
00:02:38 schools where often you'll see that the vortices that they shed in the ocean the swirling currents behind their tails also rotate in opposite directions a typical horizontal axis wind turbine Farm will generate about 2 to three watts of power per square meter of land area by contrast we've shown in our field research that these vertical axis wind turbine arrays can achieve factors
00:03:01 of 10 greater I think most people are surprised by these results because they're not inuitive it goes against the grain of what's conventionally thought to be the next steps in wind energy technology we believe that these smaller turbines in the correct Arrangements can not only be more efficient from an energy perspective but also be more economical and reduce the environmental
00:03:22 impact of wind energy one of the main thrusts of our future work is in designing New Vertical AIS wind turbine designs that are ideally suited for this new paradigm in which the turbines interact with one another and unless you're actually out there it's hard to really appreciate the challenge of being one of these structures and facing those
00:03:42 environmental conditions so a place like Caltech I think is inspiring in the sense that there are often going to be these surprising connections between various Technologies and in this case we've come across a technology that we're excited about its impact for society so I hope that one day driving down the road you'll see these turbines right alongside the large propeller
00:04:03 style ones that you see today