Building-integrated wind power.

[silverweb]

[font color="green" face="Verdana"]I love this! A recent article I saw somewhere said that wind power in the U.S. is growing fast and making a real mark.

Can't wait to see more of this! It's absolutely beautiful.

Largest Building-Integrated Wind Power System in U.S. Installed in Oklahoma City

[LongTomH]

1. R. Buckminster Fuller would have loved this!

He put wind turbine designs on his building plans back in the 1930s. He was an advocate of alternate energies decades before it became cool.

[silverweb]

6. Hopefully, we're not entirely too late taking heed.

[font color="green" face="Verdana"]I do love this graph, though: [face="Arial"]http://energy.gov/articles/banner-year-us-wind-industry[face="Verdana"]

[immoderate]

2. Read the comments. It's all for show.

Did you notice that there are no shots of the turbines turning?

The commenters at the site worked the math on those turbines. I don't think this is the answer.

--imm

[kristopher]

3. The analysis in the comments isn't valid

In general I'm not a proponent of small scale wind because it is too often overhyped to an uninformed public by less than ethical salespeople. Businesses don't usually fall into that group and are more likely to make an informed decision.

The analysis in the comments at the OP article are flawed in two ways:
1. Building surfaces (especially large buildings) can function to create site specific conditions that are radically different than the general wind conditions in the area. Without a knowledge of the way that particular building's design affects wind flow it isn't possible to make a determination of the performance of the system.

2. The average use by the commenter of an annual average wind speed grossly underestimates the production of the system. The power in wind doesn't increase linearly with the wind speed*. If you have wind speeds that are double the average you will be producing 8 times the amount produced at the average.

What this means is that the building's specific characteristics might produce a site with very favorable wind speeds that produce far more actual power than the method of analysis used by the commenter would show.

Anyone interested in a small scale wind turbine should monitor winds at the exact mounting location for at least a year before making a decision on the investment.

*"The formula for the power per m 2 in Watts = 0.5 * 1.225 * v^3 , where v is the wind speed in m/s."
http://wiki.windpower.org/index.php/Wind_energy_concepts

[immoderate]

4. Thanks.

I'll look again.

--imm

[silverweb]

5. Nicely explained.

[font color="green" face="Verdana"]Thanks.