Vertical Axis Wind Turbines (VAWTs) can be both small and large. However, they are not the mainstay of the wind industry and for that reason they are assigned a category under Small Wind Turbines on this site.
There is also an extensive collection of archival and recent photographs of VAWTs and various forms of Darrieus turbines on the Photos section of this site. There you can find photos of Vertical Axis Wind Turbines.
In research for his new book, Vaughn Nelson is turning up a number of fascinating videos. One he found is a video of Heidelberg Motor's H-rotor operating in Germany. The VAWT was unusual in that the...[more]
While deleting some old files--yes, I am one of those who deletes unnecessary files--I came across two photos I meant to post in 2018.[more]
The French offshore Vertical-Axis Wind Turbine developer Nénuphar closed its doors in early 2018. Their web site is dark, though there are several Nenuphar Animations on YouTube.com.[more]
One of the conclusions then is no doubt true today: "There is no well established relationship between Darrieus wind turbine prototype costs and volume production costs because only one company,...[more]
The report was prepared by Lawrence Schienbein Associates, Kennewick, Washington.[more]
Elsevier has published an extensive survey of attempts at building commercial Vertical-Axis Wind Turbines on its digital platform. The print version of the survey by Swedish academic Erik Möllerström...[more]
Since the 1970s, there have been several VAWT projects with installed turbines of significant size, either as attempts to commercialize VAWTs, or as university led research projects, or as a...
In 1980 the Department of Energy published a short film titled Wind: An Energy Alternative. The 12-minute film was produced by the Solar Energy Research Institute (SERI) probably in 1979.[more]
I've added a new page on photos of historical Vertical-Axis Wind Turbines to include VAWTPower Management's prototypes at Clines Corner, New Mexico.[more]
A wind farm comprised of 432 vertical-axis wind turbines on the coast of Changhua County’s Fangyuan Township (芳苑) has become the county’s latest tourist attraction. The turbines look like egg...
What's up with Canada? I've gotten two enquiries from the Great White North about Bluenergy Solarwind, a US company claiming to have developed another vertical-axis wind turbine (VAWT).[more]
Sex sells. Always has, always will. Sex has been used to sell beer, cars, and even wind energy--well, at least articles about wind energy.[more]
CGE Energy recently issued a press release applauding the US Congress for extending tax subsidies to small wind turbines. The press release also touts CGE's Darrieus wind turbine, the Wind-e 20.[more]
The 1992 report on the project by the Centre de Recherche Energétiques et Municpales reads like so many of the others from the period. In short, the four-year project was a failure for a host of...[more]
Wind historian extraordinaire Etienne Rogier sent me a carte postale (post card) promoting a 1988 French postage stamp. The card depicts the postage stamp and an experimental Darrieus turbine.[more]
The turbines ran for three months before one blade fell to the ground 190 feet below. Then a second blade crashed through a nearby storage building's roof, falling into a conference room. No one was...
Someone sent me a link to a YouTube video titled Abandoned Vertical Axis Windmill In The Magdalen Islands.[more]
Even though the blades appear curved, each is made of 11 sections with hinged connections. The rotor will be limited to about 80 rpm by using several aviation-style airbrakes in the center sections...
In response to a query from a Swedish researcher, I’ve posted eight historic photos of the Adecon Darrieus wind turbine to my web site. See Adecon under Vertical Axis Wind Turbines (VAWTs) in the...[more]
Small Vertical-Axis Wind Turbines (VAWTs) come and go so fast no one can keep track of them before they become history.[more]
I’d seen a reference to the technical paper, Optimization of a vertical axis wind turbine for application in an urban/suburban area, by two academics making the rounds but didn’t take much notice of...[more]
Oh the ways of the wind. It blows where it will--or something to that effect. We were on our way to pick cherries. That’s a fairly innocuous activity. From Bakersfield we had to cross the Antelope...[more]
The onslaught of super-dooper new windmill inventions is never ending. Frankly it’s wearing out us old timers. We can’t keep up with the damn things. We try to ignore them but our friends and...[more]
Four years after a federal grand jury in Raleigh, North Carolina returned a two-count indictment against James Alan Rowan for his fraudulent wind turbine investments, the fugitive was caught in...[more]
The work within this thesis is made in collaboration between Halmstad University and Uppsala University. A 200-kW semi-guy-wired VAWT H-rotor, owned by Uppsala University but situated in Falkenberg...
The $107,516 spires stand immobile more than two months after they were erected and more than a year after the city council approved them.
SeaTwirl has already installed a 30-kW prototype floating offshore wind turbine at Lysekil and it wants to build a full-scale machine, SeaTwirl S2, by 2020.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) concludes in a new report that rooftop-mounted and building-integrated wind turbines are a failure, though readers would be hard pressed to find that...[more]
Cleanfield made a big media splash in Ontario, Canada during the mid-2000s with its claim of producing a new wind turbine suited for mounting on buildings. [more]
There’s no better example of ignorance, hype, and hubris by people with more money at their disposal than their knowledge of energy when the government of Ontario funded Cleanfield Energy, a small...[more]
Vertical axis wind turbine design to be tested soon
French aerodynamicist Stéphan Aubin sent in a photo of Vertical-Axis Wind Turbine (VAWT) near the port of Siacca while he was vacationing in southern Italy.[more]
Controversial developer of “urban” wind projects Urban Green Energy (UGE) is quitting the wind business. Using its in-house designed vertical-axis wind turbine, the New York City-based company...[more]
That this turbine was doomed to fail—and would give small wind another—and unneeded—black eye was obvious from the beginning—for anyone who had the desire to know.[more]
A prototypye vertical axis wind turbine is set to go into operations at the Iowa Lakes Community College Farm Laboratory. - See more at:...
In sum, another story of ill-advised “development” of a revolutionary Darrieus wind turbine with all the attendant hubris and hype. The sad saga cost the government of Quebec $350,000—money that...[more]
Costing about $400,000 to purchase and install, the four wind turbines at Rim of the World High School may end up being just an expensive piece of modern art.
By now everyone has seen the fawning news accounts—several times, no doubt—that a US company has installed two wind turbines inside—yes, inside—the Eiffel Tower.[more]
I also went to the vendor’s, Wind Energy Corporation’s web site, and all I could locate was a single landing page. Red flag #1. I also searched for Jack Phillips on Linkedin and his background is...
Quiet Revolution, the one-time manufacturer of an architecturally dramatic helical wind turbine, filed for bankruptcy on 15 April in London. Note: The following is adapted from the forthcoming...[more]
In the spring of 2014, Urban Green Energy (UGE) announced with much fanfare that they had completed third-party performance testing on a new product, the VisionAIR wind turbine. As press releases for...[more]
Vertical axis wind turbines (VAWT) continue to get attention, press and R&D funding. Antagonists of mainstream wind generation continually point at them as if they were a superior technology. People...
Over the past few months, an interesting wrinkle on the vertical-axis-wind-turbines-are-better mythology has surfaced: that they are superior offshore and that many countries are investing heavily in...
Thank you for your critique on the CBC article. I do not expect to get praise or support from anyone in the wind industry for the efforts that I have made, but I do wish you and others, would keep an...[more]
It must be a slow news week out on the Canadian Prairies. No big city mayor smoking crack or threatening to kill someone in Saskatchewan to grab attention. Instead they’re touting another—yes...[more]
United States Attorney Thomas G. Walker announced that on October 18, 2013, a federal grand jury in Raleigh, North Carolina returned a two-count indictment charging JAMES ALAN ROWAN with securities...[more]
Updated with a photo of the 18 Venger V2 Savonius turbines on the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.[more]
Following the latest round of coverage, Gizmag takes a deeper look at his concept, and wonders whether the idea of packing turbines into as tight a space as possible might overlook some wind energy...
I’ve written a lot about the folly of “building integrated” wind turbines, or the corollary, roof top wind turbines. It’s a plague here in the US, Britain, and the Netherlands. To reiterate, the...[more]
Hoosiers have definitely drunk the cool-aid. Worse, it's another example of architectural greenwashing. According local press reports the Nature Conservancy has installed the "crown jewel" of its...[more]
The wind industry isn’t going to be disrupted by someone with an idea and a Powerpoint pitch. If someone is approaching you with a great investment opportunity based on a ‘new’ wind generation...
The helical rotor design is reputed to reduce or eliminate the torque ripple encountered in traditional two-blade Darrieus or eggbeater turbines.[more]
FloWind’s development of the Extended Height-to-Diameter (EHD) Vertical Axis Wind Turbine was the last gasp of Darrieus wind turbine development in the US.[more]
I've added photos of historical interest to my web pages on Vertical Axis Wind Turbines (VAWTs) and Darrieus turbines of various designs. . .[more]
There are now several measured power curves of the Mariah Windspire publicly available. This is one of the very few contemporary household-size (small) Vertical Axis Wind Turbines (VAWTs) to complete...[more]
These are series of photos of a "demonstration" of "urban wind" using five Vertical Axis Wind Turbines (VAWTs) from three different manufacturers at Crissy Field in San Francisco. They are all very...
An insightful summary of how the aerodynamic properties of VAWTs differ from HAWTs by an authority on aerodynamics presented at the 2000 AWEA conference. . .
It is unlikely that any “modern” reinvention of Darrieus designs can perform any better than the experimental turbines Sandia and its contractors developed during the late 1970s and early 1980s. . .[more]
The Windspire is a vertical‐axis gyromill. The H‐rotor is 1.22 m (4 ft) in diameter by 6.1 m (20 ft) tall, capturing a swept area of 7.43 m2 (80 ft2). The data presented in this report was collected...
News account on the bankruptcy of Cleanfield Energy. Cleanfield defaults on CAD-1.5m loan over board approved liquidation[more]
“For all wind turbines, other than those used for more decorative purposes, the cost of energy is important.”[more]
This review was a case of cleaning my desktop and before electronically filing away Sandia's year-old report on its work with Vertical Axis Wind Turbines (VAWTs), I'd decided to thumb through it and...[more]
Since Wind Energy Basics was first published in 1999, there has been an explosion of interest in new vertical-axis wind turbines. In that edition, the conclusion illustrating one photograph was...[more]
Note: The following is an excerpt from my 2009 book Wind Energy Basics Revised: A Guide to Home- and Community-scale Wind Energy Systems. I am reprinting it here because of the constant...[more]
In preparing for a review of a Sandia report on its decades-long research on Vertical Axis Wind Turbines (VAWTs), especially the Darrieus or eggbeater design, I thought it might be wise to first see...[more]
The quest to slay the faulty dragon of conventional, or horizontal axis, wind turbines (HAWTS) has been an impossible one, thus far. The domination of conventional wind comes from their reliability,...
Mariah Power, the company that produced the Sousas' wind turbines, generated headlines several years ago as an example of a successful northern Nevada company making headway in the renewable energy...
Press release claiming that Cleanfield was installing its VAWTs on rooftops "around the world." The press release implies Cleanfield's association with McMaster University and Ontario's Centres of...[more]
A combination of common vertical axis wind turbines (VAWT) rotors was designed and tested for optimal performance in low wind speeds.[more]
The French test site, SEPEN (Site Expérimental pour le Petit Eolien de Narbonne), published a performance report 28 September 2009 on Mariah's 1.2 kW Windspire. The test site is in a windy region in...[more]
Article claiming that McMaster improved the VAWTs performance 50% based on wind tunnel tests, according to Dr. Stephen Tullis, leader of the research project and Assistant Professor at McMaster.[more]
You have to give them credit, small turbine manufacturers are a competitive lot, especially small VAWT suppliers. They are tripping over themselves to see who can win the award for worst turbine...[more]
Mike Nelson call this the worst turbine install in history. It certainly ranks right up there with some recent installations by Mariah, a Vertical-Axis Wind Turbine manufacturer.[more]
Mag-Wind is back. Grab your children. Bar the door. The dead walk. . . Worse Ed Begley and Jay Leno, those omnipresent endorsers of all things "green", have leapt to the aid of the undead. Their...[more]
Press release using a common ploy to confuse amateurs by announcing UL certification. UL only certifies electrical performance not whether the wind turbine will work as a wind turbine or work well at...[more]
The Muncie (Indiana) Star recently reported that the Delaware County Redevelopment Commission awarded almost $1 million to a relatively little known German company.[more]
Presentation at the CanWEA conference i 2007 by S. Tullis at McMaster University.[more]
Product brochure by a British company for Cleanfield's 3.5 kW VAWT shown on an unusual monopole tower. To my knowledge the Cleanfield turbine was never certified under the British FIT program. This...[more]
Two videos of Cleanfield VAWTs spinning. The first shows two of its small VAWT on the roof of a what looks like a school in Ontario, Canada. The second shows a group of five turbines at an airport in...[more]
Stewart Russell captured these photos of a Mariah Windspire installed at the College School in St. Louis. Stewart is an experienced wind hand and noted that the Windspire, which is an unguyed,...[more]
Press release touting the hiring of an engineer from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario as a specialist in wind energy in urban areas.[more]
This is a classic example of how not to install wind turbines to best advantage. The best that can be said about this installation is that at least they were not mounted on top of the building.[more]
Below is summary of principle characteristics of mini- and household-size Vertical Axis Wind Turbines on the international market. It is not intended to include every VAWT marketed worldwide.[more]
Cleanfield’s first prototype small-scale Vertical Axis Wind Turbine (VAWT) has been tested in the wind tunnel at National Resources Canada’s laboratory in Ottawa.[more]
Presentation by Stephen Tullis, McMaster University.[more]
In this presentation, Stephen Tullis of McMaster University calls attempts to use Vertical-Axis Wind Turbines in urban environments "promising," but notes they are too new to conclude much.[more]
Another technical article by S. Tullis on what was the Cleanfield 3.5 kW VAWT.[more]
Another research paper by S. Tullis and his students at McMaster Univeristy. The paper acknowledges funding from the Ontario Centres of Excellence and Cleanfield Energy.[more]
Technical paper by S. Tullis and his students at McMaster University examining the wind flow around and over buildings. The work was funded by the Ontario's Centres of Excellence.[more]
The pyramids have always been thought to contain some magical power. Maybe they do. Maybe Mag-Wind has found a way to tap into this magical power, because they certainly are not going to get much...[more]
Performance testing of the Cleanfield VAWT in the 9 m NRC wind tunnel. The test results showed nothing unusual and because they were performed in a wind tunnel are not considered comparable to real...[more]
Another version of the paper by S. Tullis and his students at McMaster University on the wind tunnel tests of Cleanfield's 3.5 kW VAWT.[more]
This is an exchange on a message board by a student engineer at McMaster University displaying the VAWT they had developed and installed on a rooftop of the campus in Hamilton, Ontario. This VAWT...[more]
News item from McMaster University's student newspaper announcing the development of a Vertical-Axis Wind Turbine.[more]
At least several times a year, yet another announcement about a “technological breakthrough” arrives in my e-mail box. Invariably, the device being “unveiled” is a vertical axis wind turbine, and in...
False, Misleading and Deceptive Claims Regarding AWEA's Purported Endorsement of WindTree Energy Generator[more]
An edited version of the following was read on National Public Radio's Weekend Sunday program. Weekend Edition Sunday Re: Robbie Harris (sp)'s report on Wind Energy for Chicago/Sunday 26 August,...[more]
Like ducted turbines, a perennial favorite of hucksters and charlatans is, for lack of a better word, squirrel cage rotors. [more]
Conclusion of Sandia's design development contract for FloWind's EHD Vertical Axis Wind Turbine. . .
