The Windcatcher is a floating wind power plant based on a multi-turbine design. Through having multiple turbines on a single floating platform.
A typical floating Windcatcher can be a wall of 126 small rotors vertically on a 1,000-foot-high (324 m) framework that can produce energy for 80,000 homes.
The Windcatcher is more efficient by relying on smaller turbines with 15-meter-long blades, according to Wind Catching Systems. These small blades can perform more rotations per minute and harness higher winds of up to 17 to 18 meters per second. Thus, generating more energy.
Standing more than 1,000 ft (324 m) high, these mammoth Windcatcher grids would deploy multiple smaller turbines (no less than 117 in the render images) in a staggered formation atop a floating platform moored to the ocean floor using established practices from the oil and gas industry.
Energy scales exponentially with wind speed. Conventional turbines limits energy output above 11-12 m/s by pitching the blades. Utilizing the full energy in higher wind speeds and the multirotor effect, the Windcatcher generate 2.5x more annual energy per swept area than a conventional turbine. Having double the swept area of a conventional 15 MW wind turbine, one Windcatching unit will generate 5x the annual energy production
One of the defining features of the Windcatcher is the fact that it bypasses the cubic law valid for a single turbine – weight and cost scales with the radius^3 while energy production scales with radius^2. The scaling potential for the Windcatching Technology is phenomenal.
www.windcatching.com