Small res­i­den­tial tur­bines are get­ting smarter and sexier

Craig Saun­ders – Globe and Mail

The North York home of Sharolyn Vettese has an unusual piece of art in the back­yard. It looks a bit like an old-fashioned farm wind­mill, but with copper-coloured blades shaped like flat­tened peanuts. What makes this strange sculp­ture even more unusual is that it’s a func­tion­ing wind turbine.

Ms. Vettese and her father, Alfred Math­ieu, cre­ated the Wind Dancer as a solu­tion to many of the prob­lems that keep wind power out of res­i­den­tial areas. It doesn’t need a tall tower. It works at low wind speeds. It’s designed to bear up to the tur­bu­lent winds caused by build­ings. And, most impor­tantly, it’s pretty. At the very least, it’s a change from the three-bladed tur­bines going up all over Canada.

“My father, who is my part­ner and co-designer, he grew up on a farm in Alberta and there were a lot of wind­mills like that for pump­ing water for cat­tle,” she says.

Most wind tur­bine design­ers talk like engi­neers. Ms. Vettese is dif­fer­ent. She talks about design and aes­thet­ics, too. Wind is a force of nature, and to har­ness its energy, she wanted a design that would reflect nature. The eight gen­tly curved blades of the Wind Dancer are one example.

“I was hav­ing break­fast on my front porch in Toronto, and saw the maple keys com­ing down, and noticed how per­fectly they landed,” she says. She took the keys to her father, who has degrees in engi­neer­ing, chem­istry and a PhD in agri­cul­ture, and he con­curred. But the design isn’t just there to look pretty, it’s prac­ti­cal, too. “Because the end of the blade is big­ger, there’s a big­ger sur­face area to catch the wind,” she says.

Small wind tur­bines have been pop­u­lar with cot­tagers and boaters for years. But they’ve never really caught on in cities. Trees and build­ings block the wind and make it so tur­bu­lent that it can wear a tur­bine down quickly. Tra­di­tion­ally, they’ve also needed tall, unsightly tow­ers that some­times draw com­plaints from neigh­bours. And the fast-spinning blades can be noisy, or even dan­ger­ous if they come off.

Ron Flynn, a home­owner in Alber­ton, Prince Edward Island, learned some of these lessons the hard way. He had to lobby hard to get his small tur­bine up in 2007. In the end, he got few has­sles about the tur­bine and tower, but even his two-acre lot on the out­skirts of town was poorly suited for wind power.

“It went up and didn’t cause much tur­moil, and went down again with­out much fuss,” he says. The prob­lem? “Not enough wind to sus­tain it.” Trees on either side made the site too calm.

The Wind Dancer, which won a Toronto Design Exchange design award in 2007, is part of a new breed of small tur­bines that have been designed to work in places with slower, more tur­bu­lent winds. And they’re catch­ing on.

Toronto devel­oper Shane Baghai recently bought two Wind Dancer tur­bines from Vettese’s com­pany, Wind Sim­plic­ity. They’re installed on his St. Gabriel Vil­lage condominium build­ing on Shep­herd Avenue East in Toronto.

“I love to look at them,” he says. Mr. Baghai was an early pro­po­nent of envi­ron­men­tal design and solar power, but was unhappy with the per­for­mance and eco­nom­ics of small wind tur­bines until he found the Wind Dancer. “You truly appre­ci­ate the blend­ing of nat­ural forces with this won­der­ful gad­get. It really does dance with the wind. I like that.”

He also likes the fact that it’s vir­tu­ally silent and doesn’t cause the sort of vibra­tions he expe­ri­enced with other small tur­bines, which spin at very high speeds. But most of all, he’s happy to have found a small tur­bine that makes eco­nomic sense.

In the past, the tur­bines have been too small to be eco­nom­i­cal. The ones he bought from Ms. Vettese are avail­able in sizes from 3 kilo­watts to 23 kilo­watts. But power and design come at a price. They range from $27,000 to $69,000, not includ­ing the tower.

Mr. Baghai still prefers solar to wind for urban appli­ca­tions. But he clearly is thrilled with his two new tur­bines. And aes­thet­ics have a lot to do with it. After all, if an upscale condo is going to spend big bucks on designer faucets and hard­ware, why not spend a few bucks on a designer windmill?

Unlike other tur­bines, this one also comes with an option to get a cus­tom paintjob. It will cost an extra $6,000, and is most likely to be bought by a com­pany that wants to tie green power to its cor­po­rate brand, says Ms. Vettese.

If the price tag is too steep, there are other options, and they too eschew the stan­dard three-bladed design. Mr. Fournier points to the Wind Terra, a 1.2 Kw tur­bine that mounts directly to the roof of a house – no tower required.

Most tur­bines have blades that spin ver­ti­cally. The Wind Terra spins hor­i­zon­tally, which reduces dam­age from tur­bu­lent winds, he says. And, like the Wind Dancer, it works well at low wind speeds. It might not be as pretty as its Toronto cousin, but it’s not par­tic­u­larly ugly and only costs about $11,000 installed.

“In the wind busi­ness, height is every­thing,” he says. The higher the tur­bine, the stead­ier the wind. “What you’re sav­ing in this case is the cost of the tower.”

When wind blows over a roof, it speeds up a bit, and that gives the Wind Terra a bit of a boost. It only needs winds of four to five miles an hour to work, Mr. Fournier says. And because of its slower move­ment, it’s also quiet.

Another option is the Skys­tream 3.7, a 1.8-Kw tur­bine with scimitar-shaped blades. It costs about $13,000 to $15,000 includ­ing the tower and instal­la­tion. It’s designed to tie directly into the power grid, and has an inverter right up near the blades (instead of on the ground, as is the case with most tur­bines). This has the advan­tage of cut­ting the amount of elec­tric­ity lost when it’s trans­mit­ted through wires to the ground.

Because these tur­bines all use shorter tow­ers, the safety and vis­i­bil­ity con­cerns that have kept wind power out of cities are greatly reduced, and the door seems to now be open to small urban wind­mills. Tying them into the elec­tri­cal grid is becom­ing eas­ier, too, with new smart meters and poli­cies allow­ing peo­ple to sell power from such small turbines.

But the sys­tems still need a bat­tery bank if they’re going to be used to pro­vide emer­gency power in case of a black­out, and that will add to the price tag.

There’s the added bonus that, with Wind Dancer, home­own­ers in tony neigh­bour­hoods can finally buy their very own designer wind tur­bine. With a design award to back them up, they’ll be able to brag about their func­tional new art at cock­tail parties.

“It really shows a reac­tion to the forces of nature vis­i­bly. You see it,” says Mr. Baghai.

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