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In the basement of a house in Auckland's Mt Albert is a contraption that could help satisfy the country's growing appetite for electricity. It could also ease the anguish of painter Grahame Sydney, writer Brian Turner and former All Black Anton Oliver, prominent opponents of a vast wind farm planned for the Lammermoor Range in Otago.
The device is a wind turbine designed and built by Chris Sacatos, who studied at the Academy of Aeronautics in New York state in the 1960s, before working for several years in the Canadian aircraft industry. Sacatos, who is 80, has been trying to drum up Government and commercial interest in his creation for the past two years, without success.
His claims for what he has dubbed the Aeolian wind turbine, after the Greek god of wind, certainly appear worthy of investigation. Chiefly, he asserts that the design is much less intrusive than the turbines Meridian Energy's Project Hayes would dot over 92sq km of Otago hills.
He says it is also more efficient, yet so simple it can be built from local materials by local labour, for about $1 million less than conventional windmills.
The technical claims are hard to verify but there can be little argument about the visual impact of his design compared with the 100m-plus Project Hayes turbines.
A production version of Sacatos' design wouldn't be small. His plans show a 36m-diameter rotor with an 18m-wide gate to funnel air to the rotor blades.
The key difference between his turbine and the type being installed in their thousands in New Zealand and overseas is the Aeolian spins horizontally rather than vertically. Just to be confusing, the Aeolian is a vertical axis wind turbine (VAWT), and the other type a horizontal axis wind turbine (HAWT).
The Aeolian would be about 6m high and could be shielded by vegetation. The Project Hayes HAWTs would be 160m from ground to rotor tip.
Sacatos says his turbine extracts about four times the energy of an HAWT at a given wind speed, by virtue of the venturi effect, which says air speeds up when it passes through a constricted opening.
Wind blown through the gate of his model turbine (he uses an industrial fan to demonstrate) at about 4.4m/s is accelerated to 17.65m/s at the rotor blades by the narrowing of the funnel. A generator converts the rotor's torque into electricity, lighting a small lamp fixed to the model.
Sacatos says no special skill is required to build the Aeolian. While the generator would need to be imported, the rest could be made from framing timber, plywood and galvanised iron.
But a letter to Agriculture Minister Jim Anderton in November 2006 elicited encouragement and nothing more.
Geoff Henderson, chief executive of Christchurch HAWT manufacturer Windflow Technology, is sceptical of the Aeolian design. Henderson has decades of wind energy experience, including a couple of years at Altamont Pass in California, the location of thousands of turbines of all shapes and sizes.
"Sorry to sound like a naysayer but I've spent 32 years working on wind power and I've seen a lot of designs come and go." He thinks the Aeolian design sounds structurally suspect.
Californian Paul Gipe, author of several books on wind power, is even more dismissive. In an email, Gipe says VAWTs are no more efficient than HAWTs, and there's no evidence that they're quieter.
But they're less of a blot on the landscape. Sydney, president of Save Central, a group opposing Project Hayes, thinks VAWTs worthy of investigation.
Sydney would like to see research into wind-generation alternatives get Government funding in the same way it has put $1.85 million into a planned tidal-power project on the Kaipara Harbour. "I wish it [Government support] was happening over a far wider range of options - there are all sorts of inventive people out there."
One thing generally agreed on is the suitability of wind power for distributed generation. In Denmark, a wind energy leader, 75 per cent of generation is owned and operated by individuals and co-operatives, according to Gipe, who received the World Wind Energy Association's award this year for his work advocating community wind power.
Sydney says Aeolian-type turbines are "the logical way to head for small-scale production".
Says Sacatos: "[The Aeolian] is ideally suited to small communities and industries wishing to secure - albeit partly - their own power supply.
"What have we got to lose?"
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