wind up tree

September 13, 2024 7:25 AM

If the Wind Tree is deemed tall and large to occupy an allotted space, Wind Palm may be an ideal alternative. It is made up of three to five steel trunks & branches with 18 to 30 rotating leaves[ ]with the option of adding the solar panels at the bottom of the leaves for extra energy generation [designboom]

trees, previously

posted by HearHere (11 comments total)

This looks very cool! Though with the individual leaves starting at €700 my thoughts of putting one in my garden are probably not going to happen.

Still, I'd love to see these catch on and be around!
posted by fader at 7:33 AM on September 13 [2 favorites]

yeah, i also prefer diy [motherearthnews], yet it’s neat to see commercial/communal options
posted by HearHere at 9:14 AM on September 13 [1 favorite]

So that's where they harvest buttplugs from.
posted by lucidium at 9:31 AM on September 13 [4 favorites]

Not tall enough to reach decent laminar air in any of the examples shown and in the header image about half of the solar panels are shaded by the turbines and producing nothing. A 6kW Solaflect's not so pretty, but I bet it soundly beats a 10kW Wind Tree on energy production, while costing less.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 9:44 AM on September 13 [2 favorites]

I dunno, I was under the impression that small-scale wind is almost never cost-effective when compared to solar by itself?
posted by aramaic at 9:45 AM on September 13 [2 favorites]

I got yer small-scale wind right here
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:14 AM on September 13 [3 favorites]

I am a bit put off by all the embodied materials, technology and maintenance costs in this thing that is not necessary when using straight up solar.
posted by seanmpuckett at 10:16 AM on September 13 [1 favorite]

small scale wind turbines are horribly loud, take a lot of maintenance, and produce very little energy.

Those solar panels are much too small to provide much juice either.

Here is an idea, take a parking lot and cover the parking with solar panels, or a big box building, or your home, or whatever structure already is clogging up the landscape.

Then take this nice parcel of park space, and plant a real life native tree, one that will support local wild life, produce fruits for local wild life, that changes with the seasons, that maintains itself (for the most part) and will enrich the soil, help cool the local area etc.

Then once we have covered every possible human structure with solar panels, we go out and put up some big as hell wind turbines in some farms and other places humans have already plowed under.

Then instead of building crypto mining operations, and LLM AI data centers, we instead mandate very strict efficiency measures.

Not to yuk anyone's yum, but this is a gimmick sculpture at best, and a waste of space and resources at worse.

Is this a lovely little sculpture, yes. Do I agree with the motivations behind it, yes.
posted by stilgar at 11:25 AM on September 13 [4 favorites]

we instead mandate very strict efficiency measures
Americans historically do not like being told what to do. telling them to turn off their AC when it's hot, won't work either.
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 11:57 AM on September 13 [1 favorite]

I was talking more like, you set a standard for how efficient an AC has to be in order to be sold, same for light bulbs, etc. No one has to turn the AC off, but maybe you can't sell one that isn't sipping energy instead of guzzling it. While we are at it we could make a fee you pay when you buy something, and that fee has to cover the recycling, so companies that have easier to recycle products, can charge lower fee's. If we are wed to capitalism, we can at least try a little harder to make it work for us.

As the planet warms, we are going to need some very efficient Air Conditioners, and as more and more people live in hotter and hotter places, good resource and land use policy is going to be key to helping them survive.
posted by stilgar at 12:18 PM on September 13 [1 favorite]

aramaic, "The most efficient residential solar panel on the market is able to convert 20% of energy harnessed from the sun. On the other hand, wind turbines can convert between 60% – 90% of the energy they harness from wind. So technically, wind energy is the front runner in efficiency when it comes to natural, clean energy" [nexamp]

rhamphorhynchus, for sites where rotating solar panels or even a fixed array can help (yes, stilgar, i keep seeing more parking lots being covered with solar panel roofs;) this is a great idea! rather than laminar flow, vertical-axis wind turbines (vawts) are more designed for turbulence. "VAWTs ... have wakes that recover relatively quickly, in some cases within six turbine diameters downstream. They can thus be placed in closely packed arrays for improved wind-farm power densities." [journal of renewable & sustainable energy]

solarfeeds' comparison of axis versus fixed solar panel applications may interest you

tldr: it's not always sunny in Philadelphia [pitt]
posted by HearHere at 7:16 PM on September 13