Seems that the roof of a building would be a good place to put a wind turbine, since it's an exposed location & it could power the building. With a vertical-axis turbine, the gearbox & generator can be put on lower floors for accessibility & the wind can even be directed over the top of the building to turn the rotor. Wiki says the downsides are
Quote:
The key disadvantages include the low rotational speed with the consequential higher torque and hence higher cost of the drive train, the inherently lower power coefficient, the 360 degree rotation of the aerofoil within the wind flow during each cycle and hence the highly dynamic loading on the blade, the pulsating torque generated by some rotor designs on the drive train, and the difficulty of modelling the wind flow accurately and hence the challenges of analysing and designing the rotor prior to fabricating a prototype.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_tu...al_axis_design
I wonder what can be done to minimize these downsides? I don't know much about this stuff.