Ducted Turbines & Rooftop Mounting: Will These Ideas Ever Die? Not with DOE Doling Out Funding

By Paul Gipe

The US Department of Energy (DOE) announced 19 November 2019 that the Distributed Wind Competitiveness Improvement Project had awarded a grant to Ducted Turbines of Potsdam, New York for nearly $200,000.

Ducted Turbines is a spin off from Clarkson University professor Ken Visser.

Clarkson, in a press release with few details, notes that Visser will “use the grant to advance the pre-prototype design of their new ducted 3-kW wind system.”

Visser had installed a prototype of his ducted design mounted on a university building for Earth Day 2019.

DOE also announced a grant to Westergaard Solutions who “will implement an innovative building-integrated wind generation concept with no external moving parts, moving from a preliminary conceptual design to a pre-production prototype design that is ready for testing.”

Apparently this is in reference to Dr. Carsten Westergaard’s company Aeromine that is developing an “innovative aerodynamic concept” that combines wind and solar on urban rooftops.

Aeromine claims the concept has “no technology risk, no component risk, no manufacturing risk, no installation risk, and no operational risk.”

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