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Beautiful Wind Turbines Around the World

Beautiful Wind Turbines Around the World

Quiet Revolution’s QR 5 is a beautiful vertical axis turbine with carbon fiber composite blades. you can buy one for $50,000 and it produces enough energy to pay for itself in 18 years, at today’s energy prices.

Currently under construction, the design for the World Trade Center in Bahrain, is, (in an act of complete design stupidity) a twin tower design, meaning that the world’s only twin tower ‘World Trade Center’ will be on Saudi’s doorstep. It will feature 3 enormous wind turbines, between the towers, making it the largest structure in the world with integrated wind power.

I don’t speak Dutch and assume that this is just a Photoshop mockup for a modern windmill. However, I think it would be a masterful combination of art and science were it to be built exactly as is, like a leafless tree in winter in a barren landscape.

Design Michael Jantzen’s dream is to have wind powered generators on footbridges in parks around the world.

What makes the Blueneregy wind turbine unique, is that its entire surface is covered in solar cells which work on curved surfaces since they do not need to be normal to the sun’s rays.

Places like the coats of Denmark are where entire fields of enormous and graceful wind generators of more that a megawatt each have been built. This monster will produce more than 3 MW. There is something wonderfully ironic about what looks like a North Sea oil platform being used to erect it.

Architects often add the best bits to the top of buildings when they design them, because clients tend to look down on the roof of a model, when commissioning them. The fancy bits at the top of this tower, for Elephant and Castle (a depressing part of London with no castles or exotic fauna) would be an interesting precedent if they became commonplace for all skyscrapers.

Holland is the traditional home of wind power, because its flat landscapes provide little shelter from offshore winds. This is a cute and practical propeller-headed street lamp.

Pictured here is a design for a tethered inflatable wind turbine, an idea that is rumored to be being worked on by Makani Power, a company which is backed by Google.

Selsam, who make real and innovative wind turbines also provide renderings of how they imagine wind power might work on grandiose projects. Pictured here is their proposal for a half mile high zero energy tower with its own water desalination plant.

Selsam created a proposal for giant fields of fishing rod like turbines anchored on the sea bed and flexed against the wind. This proposal goes one step further to imagine the rod structures being held aloft by blimps.

I love this beautiful and unusual conical turbine. Three interleaved logarithmic gleaming steel spirals like a giant sea shell.

It may seem a bit perverse to replace the traditional wind capturing device - the sail, with a turbine that then translates wind turbine energy into a form that propels a water turbine - or propeller. This device would seem to contradict the 2nd law of thermodynamics, but what do we know, perhaps it works

Rooftop Turbines is a company in the UK that specializes in just that. A solid and practical niche for reducing building energy costs.

Portable wind turbine design only for charging your mobile iPod etc etc..