A Swedish Company Wants to Transform Offshore Wind with Vertical-Axis Turbines

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Even as more offshore wind projects launch and the turbines they use get bigger, there are questions around offshore wind's economic viability. Unsurprisingly, hauling huge equipment with multiple moving parts out to deep, windy sections of ocean, setting them up, and building lines to transmit the electricity they generate back to land is expensive. Really expensive. In our profit-driven capitalist economy, companies aren't going to sink money into technologies that don't deliver worthwhile returns.

A Swedish energy company called SeaTwirl is flipping the offshore wind model on its head-not quite literally, but almost-and betting it will be able to deliver cheap renewable energy and make a profit along the way. SeaTwirl is one of several companies developing vertical-axis wind turbines, and one of just a couple developing them for offshore use.

A quick refresher on what vertical axis means: the turbines we're used to seeing (that is, on land, at a distance, often from an interstate highway or rural road), have horizontal axes; like windmills, their blades spin between parallel and perpendicular to the ground, anchored by a support column that's taller than the diameter covered by the spinning blades.

[...] The generator in a vertical-axis turbine, on the other hand, can be placed anywhere on said vertical axis; in an offshore context, this means it can be at the waterline or below, adding weight where weight is needed.

Vertical-axis turbines can also use wind coming from any direction. Since their rotation doesn't take up as much space as that of horizontal-axis turbines nor create as much of a blocking effect on downwind turbines, they can be placed closer together, generating more electricity in a given footprint.

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