Wind turbines are rarely designed for cities-they are loud, affect views, and buildings tend to block the winds anyway. Eager to find an aesthetically-pleasing solution for harvesting wind energy in urban environments, TU Delf student Murtada Alkaabi designed a panel wind harvesting façade system suitable for buildings located on the coast. It goes to show that wind power can be integrated into architecture without making it look ugly.
Murtada Alkaabi’s design focuses on building facades. Most suitable for modular buildings, the wind harvesting system comprised of numerous panels that react to prevailing winds and create beautiful patterns across the facades. Combined with rain harvesting mechanisms, green roofs and photovoltaics, the wind harvesting façade system would generate power that would be fed back into the grid and help cut the building’s electricity bills.
To prove that his is not a simply conceptual design, Alkaabi calculated the amount of energy the system would produce and compared it to the existing 11-turbine wind farm covering three square miles in Belgium and reached the conclusion that the new design would have significantly smaller footprint while generating the same amount of power. Makes you wonder about the spatial efficiency of having wind farms spreading across miles of the Earth’s surface.