How This TRULY Omni-Directional Wind Turbine is Genius

Small wind turbines, or SWTs, have struggled to get off the ground. Not only is siting more difficult for SWTs, but their low efficiencies rarely justify their high costs. They also have to contend with the same kinds of considerations that your typical turbine does, like noise, vibration, environmental impacts, and aesthetics. In closer proximity to people, these factors are that much more important (and difficult) to nail.

So what are our options if we want to go against conventional wind turbine logic by thinking smaller, not bigger? Well, there’s a lot of high-speed winds to make good use of, and they’re not all in the mountains or out to sea. Those of you living in major cities probably know this…and someday soon, wind turbines might be integrated seamlessly into your surroundings. Assuming they aren’t already.

How can SWTs turn windy city streets into an opportunity? When can apartment dwellers start to produce their own wind energy? And why was one SWT company inspired by a NASA rover shaped like a beach ball?

We’re at the point in solar’s mass adoption where it’s near-ubiquitous in the clean energy transition. It’s no secret that wind, though more impactful in terms of bang for buck, has been lagging behind. Part of the problem is that wind has a much larger footprint. You can slap a solar array right on top of your existing roof, but you can’t exactly stick a standard-sized turbine in your backyard. Unless…you downsize.

However, as time has gone by and I’ve covered more and more types of SWTs on the channel, my opinion on residential wind — specifically in the context of single-family, detached homes like mine— has shifted with the breeze. I personally believe that in that case, wind isn’t appropriate for the vast majority of suburban homes. The land and location requirements are simply too much for the average homeowner.

But that doesn’t mean that residential wind in general has no chance. Truth is, most of the world lives in cities, especially in the U.S., where about 80% of the population resides in urban areas.¹²³ Metropolitan environments pose unique challenges for harnessing wind energy, though. O-Innovations is one of several companies rising to these challenges. Its turbine design can (quite literally) empower apartment-dwellers to produce their own energy with wind.⁴ I recently had the chance to interview Nicolas Orellana, founder and CEO of O-Innovations and co-developer of the O-Wind turbine. As he told me:

“If you live in a house in the rural areas, you can put up solar panels or whatever, and you make yourself responsible for it. But in urban spaces, there’s no way. You’re not responsible for it. You’re just giving the problem to someone else.You just require a number of kilowatt hours per day. So, first of all, raising awareness, making people understand that it is a problem that they need to be a part of. And secondly, giving the possibility to solve a problem, right? It’s not just me feeling bad that I’m requesting something that I can’t provide. It’s actually something I can take action on.” -Nicolas Orellana

City planners and architects, by design, need to be conscious of the turbulence generated by and between buildings. The reason why wind turbines stretch so far up into the sky is that wind speeds are higher…where it’s higher. It’s no different in a concrete jungle. The problem is that without proper planning, these rowdy winds will rush down the smooth surfaces of tall structures, bringing them to ground level. This is what’s known as downwash…AKA the reason why some outdoor restaurant seating fails.⁵⁶

That’s far from the only physics phenomena at play. There’s also the fact that wind accelerates as it collides with corners. Then there’s the wake effect, yet another way that turbulent winds can travel to the ground level and cause trouble, and the Venturi effect, which I’ll get to in a minute. Altogether, it makes for a lot of chaotic, rough wind ⁵⁶ and—yes—a lot of lost hats.

“In those places, you have really very accelerated winds, a lot of energy. We call this high energy potential spots. In these places, the wind can go up to three times the speed as in a normal open space, and that means 27 times the energy. But harnessing that wind, which goes in different directions, vertical, horizontal, diagonal, eddies, everything. And it changes speed as well, it changes and changes all the time. So it’s really difficult to harness for any other wind turbines. Wind turbines are regularly designed for clean wind, that’s what they call it. And that’s why these big fans are located…offshore or onshore, but in really specific places where they can harness that. Clean wind means a steady direction, steady speed. This wind in cities is totally the opposite.” -Nicolas Orellana

But that hasn’t kept engineers from looking for ways to tame these wild winds.

Longtime viewers might remember how a while back we covered the Dutch company IBIS Power and its PowerNEST turbine installation on the tops of flat-roofed buildings, like apartment complexes. The PowerNEST takes advantage of the Venturi effect — the tendency for wind velocity to increase as it funnels through a narrower channel. The Venturi effect explains how forceful winds can bear down on pedestrians walking between two buildings.⁶⁵ I have vivid memories of walking to work in downtown Boston and feeling like I was in a wind tunnel experiment.

The O-Wind is also built to handle all these nasty gusts, and it’s what it does best:

“This is not the turbine that’s meant to take out all the other turbines in the world. It’s not going toe to toe with offshore turbines. It’s meant for a specific use case, which is the turbulent wind in cities and structures.” -Nicolas Orellana

We’ve covered the Aeromine rooftop turbine a few times on the channel already, and while it and the O-Wind fill different niches, they do share a foundation. Like the Aeromine, the O-Wind’s design relies on Bernoulli’s principle, which is the basis for both how airplane wings achieve lift and how wind turbine blades spin.⁷ That said, the O-Wind sets itself apart from other SWTs because of its ability to capture winds from any direction, on both the vertical and horizontal planes.⁴

“It can take wind not only horizontal, but also vertical gusts and from above, from below, so really omnidirectional. The word ‘omnidirectional’ has been misused in the past by vertical axis wind turbines, but omni means all, so ‘all winds’ includes vertical thrust as well.” -Nicolas Orellana

Here’s how it works. The sphere-shaped O-Wind is covered by a series of vents with larger openings on one side than the other. As wind moves through these vents, it creates a pressure difference. According to Bernoulli’s principle, as wind speeds up through the smaller exits, the pressure decreases. This pressure difference creates the force needed to rotate the turbine.⁷⁴

Orellana originally designed the O-Wind in college for a final project on space exploration. After catching wind of NASA’s “tumbleweed rover,” which was created for rolling around Mars, he was inspired to invent his own wind-powered device. He didn’t adapt it for electrification until 12 years later.

“I came across an opportunity to apply for a contest. And the scope was pretty wide — anything that’s also a problem. So I thought, why not? Let’s try and dust off this, this old invention that we’re going to see if it can do something.” -Nicolas Orellana

The O-Wind in its current form can capture wind from any direction, but it only spins along a single axis.⁷⁴ That means fewer moving parts and no need for steering. If you remember my video on the challenges of residential wind, you know that this is a big benefit. It’s moving parts — and the maintenance they require — that are typically small-scale wind’s Achilles’ heel.

What about the other problems that hover about wind energy? As of our August interview, O-Innovations had yet to get hard numbers on the turbine’s noise levels. But according to Orellana, the O-Wind is “virtually silent.”

“Whenever the wind is blowing, you can hear the wind. You cannot hear anything coming out from the turbine.” -Nicolas Orellana

Pilot testing located at a farm has also shown that the O-Wind is relatively unobtrusive:

“We have had so far in the pilot that I mentioned one and a half years, and it has, we haven’t had any incidents with any kind of environmental issues or, or wildlife. No birds, no insects, no ants, no nests, no nothing inside. It’s been great.” -Nicolas Orellana

These are all good things, but there’s always the million-dollar question: is the turbine cost-competitive? The short answer is: it depends. During our interview, Orellana emphasized that the O-Wind’s performance is contingent on proper siting. This is not a SWT for open spaces, and the first version that will be released in the market, a 2.2 meter (or 7.2 feet) diameter model, is intended for urban use. Orellana described the price point like this:

“We think it’s going to be comparable to the standard solar panel installation in the UK. Given the solar conditions in the UK, it’s going to be pretty much there in the price tag and ROI as well.” -Nicolas Orellana

As for the O-Wind’s estimated power output, it ranges between “2 and 5,000 kilowatt hours per year.” That’s enough to cover the average annual electricity consumption for households in the UK…but in the U.S., not so much.⁸ An O-Wind would really only be relevant in certain regions of the States, considering that the average apartment tends to fall in the 6,000 kWh range. (Note that these figures are based on 2015 data.)⁹ To put things into perspective, the average annual electricity consumption for all homes in the U.S. in 2020 was about 10,566 kWh.¹⁰

It’s worth pointing out here, though, that U.S. energy consumption is much higher than other countries’. According to Our World in Data, “the average American consumes about the same amount of energy in one month as the average Indian consumes in an entire year. The average Brit consumes double that of the average Brazilian.”¹¹ So, even though an O-Wind isn’t meant for single-family homes in the States and probably couldn’t enable New Yorkers to reach total energy independence, it’s definitely not without its use cases.

Currently, O-Innovations is working to publicly demonstrate the latest iteration of the O-Wind, and the company has Spotify sponsoring its next pilot project. Once that round of testing is done, Orellana hopes to have the turbine on the market by the end of next year.

“There are turbines out there, and there are some people trying them. But, all together, it’s not mature, right? There’s still a lot of space for urban implementation, and there’s not one yet that has made a breakthrough. So, we hope we’re going to be the first one to start populating the urban space with energy.” -Nicolas Orellana