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A Dutch company has launched a new type of wind turbine that is small enough to fit onto the roof of a house. The turbine looks like a Nautilus shell, and their website explains how it works:
Most today's wind turbines require that a difference in pressure between the front and the rear side of the rotor blades be maintained in order to be effective. However, this difference in pressure also has a negative effect called "drag".
Our turbine rotor captures the kinetic energy of the wind due to its speed, and, by reversing the wind and reducing it to almost zero Beaufort converts it into mechanical energy. By doing this the wind speed's effect (in kinetic energy) on the rotor is maximized and "lift" is obtained by the wind's acceleration over the rotor plane.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Zinho on Monday June 02 2014, @07:25PM
It's actually less than that; if you were to completely stop the incoming air (remove all of its KE) then it would pile up on the downwind side of the turbine. We've known for most of a century [wikipedia.org] that you can only really extract ~60% of the KE from the wind before slowing the air down too much hurts your efficiency.
In other words, I totally agree with you, and it's worse than you thought.
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