cityscape
Public Works: Turning Wind Turbines Into Functional Urban Art
A French startup has found a way to harness wind power that's easy on the eyes and ears.
Public Works looks at public space, urban design, and city-building innovations from around the world, and considers what Toronto might learn from them.
Image courtesy of New Wind.
A French startup is trying to revolutionize the use of wind energy. The company, called New Wind, has developed a mini-windmill that is equal parts power generator and public art piece. Called the Wind Tree, this new model is, well, a tree, made of metal and featuring branches adorned with football-shaped leaves in various shades of green. Each “leaf” is really a turbine, with small wind-powered blades.
The Wind Tree has a generating capacity of up to 3.1 kilowatts, depending on wind speed. That’s not a huge amount: to put it in perspective, General Electric currently markets turbines with capacities as high as 4.1 megawatts—more than 1,000 times the capacity of the Wind Tree. But all it takes to get Wind Tree working is a 7.25-km/h wind, meaning its little turbines will spin on twice as many days as a full-size turbine.
There are some distinct advantages to these metal trees. The prototypes are about eight metres tall, whereas standard turbines can reach over 60 metres tall. The Wind Tree would therefore more suitable to urban environments than would regular wind turbines. Wind Trees can be hooked up to an individual building’s power system, and New Wind founder Jérôme Michaud-Larivière told the Daily Mail he envisions Wind Trees powering cities’ LED street lights or electric-car-charging stations.
There is currently a Wind Tree in the Pleumeur-Bodou community in northwestern France. And in May 2015, a Wind Tree will be displayed at Paris’s Place de Concorde. Around that time, says New Wind, the units will be made available for purchase by the public.
Innovations such as the Wind Tree have the potential to change the way wind energy is used. In the same way that solar power has become something a homeowner can harness by placing a few panels on their roof, the small noiseless Wind Tree could one day end up in backyards all over Toronto.
Wind power is a growing enterprise in Ontario. At the start of 2014, there were 1,328 wind turbines on 51 sites across the province. As of July, Ontario was home to a third of Canada’s installed wind power capacity. In other words, if Canada’s wind turbines were all hustling at full capacity, one-third of the 8,517 megawatts they produced would come from Ontario.
Wind Trees could resolve some (rather dubious) local concerns over wind power generation. They have an attractive pop-art quality to them, making them a potential answer to the foofaraw about wind turbines being an eyesore. And, more importantly, they are guaranteed to be silent.
A couple in Goderich, Ontario, are fighting a legal battle to stop the development of a wind turbine nearby, on the basis that sound from the turbines might harm their health, and that they were being used as “guinea pigs in the name of green energy.” As reported in the Globe and Mail, Ontario’s Environmental Review Tribunal has found no proven link between the noise of wind turbines and human health problems. All the same, Health Canada is conducting a study of the physical effects of wind turbine noise, the findings of which “will support the Government and other stakeholders by strengthening the evidence base that supports decisions, advice and policies regarding wind turbine development proposals, installations and operations.”
Wind Trees don’t have the capacity to replace the large turbines we use now. But, by using the two methods in tandem, we could make wind power more accessible and more palatable to everyone—even those who are opposed to it now.