The quest for concentrated wind power

Leviathan Energy presents a new design concept

While concentrated solar power is entering the commercialisation phase, 'concentrated wind power' is still in the area of bold claims intended to attract research money.

The idea of concentrated wind power is to build a structure that conducts the wind towards the turbine blades and in this way harvests more power.

Recently, an article on CleanTechnica presented a new design of this kind created by Leviathan Energy. It consists of a screen around the base of the turbine that changes air circulation. The company claims this passive structure can increase the turbine efficiency from 30% to as much as 150% at low wind speeds (0-6 meters per second).

According to Dr. Daniel Farb, CEO of Leviathan Energy, this is a breakthrough technology. Some CleanTechnica readers however dare to doubt this claim. The test model presented by Leviathan Energy shows a very small wind turbine. According to one reader, to increase the efficiency of such a turbine it is a cheaper option to simply make a higher pole and longer rotor blades — something that wind manufacturers have already been doing in recent decades. If the structure of Leviathan Energy has to be built around a 2 MW turbine, it would require a huge construction taking up a large surface of possibly arable land.

Those considerations do not mean that the concept of Leviathan Energy is worthless, but rather that it would need a complete and independent economic analysis before proclaiming a technological breakthrough. I’m sure the main wind manufacturing players will quickly make such an analysis.

As already mentioned above, the idea of concentrating wind power to increase the efficiency of wind turbines is not new — it already has a long history. In the summer of 2008 we reported on the 'jet engine concept' of the FloDesign company in the U.S. (article 'New growth factors for wind industry').