i.e. it may be sufficiently in the game to compete effectively against "no turbines" even if it can't compete against turbines directly.
That's if everything the company claims is true. Too many other alternative energy companies have made similar claims and failed to follow through for me to take this with anything other than a grain of salt.
edited for clarity.
Same here. I've also read up on a lot of different designs, and have been paying attention for a while now.
There are a couple of points that have occurred to me about wind power. 1) Most supposedly exciting, new designs are minor variations on older designs with minor improvements in efficiency. 2) Some esoteric design are actually good for something, but not for massive wind farms. Think wind turbine as art in a public park, etc. 3) Media love esoteric designs and want to hype it as the next thing, even though they are nowhere near the efficiency of a big 3-blade on a tall pole design.
That's why the classic windmill design is so classic: its efficiency scales with the square of the length of the rotors. The energy extracted by a windmill is (very roughly):
But then the wind speed also increases with height.[2] So the game to design an efficient windmill is to sweep out as much cross-sectional area as possible, as high up in the air as possible, and that's how we get the iconic windmills we have.I don't know anything about anything -- I just read this stuff on Wikipedia. But until a third-party engineer says otherwise, I'm super skeptical that a device like this with minimal high-altitude cross-section is anywhere in the game.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betz%27s_law [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_profile_power_law