It is complete nonsense to suggest that wind turbines alone can supply the energy needs for the entire world.

How would these turbines supply high density energy and power required for the transportation of enormous quantities of materials around the planet, e.g by trucks, ships and aeroplanes?

How would these turbines supply the needs of populations that are not in favourable wind regimes?

Please, read the book and you will find the "how"!

Pass. It sounds like this is just a marketting ploy for your book.

I am not selling my book! The book and all the related materials are freely available at wwwr-siteorg/Verteolo/index.htm

I know. But I wanted to know some simple answers without having to wade through an entire book.

If we have a sufficiently powerful energy source (not based on exhaustible resources!) we could generate all the necessary electric energy and synthesize artificial fertilizers and fuels for trucks, ships, aircraft, etc.

The VertEolo project, which is exposed in the book, is quite simple in its conception and could generate easily and cheaply huge amounts of energy without consuming any exhaustible resource! Please, read the book and, afterwards, tell me consciously if I am a mad liar or if my proposal is realistic!

you do need to provide a summery on main ideas of your project with existing design of harvesting energy from wind.  144 pages linear reading is quite an expensive investment of individual reader's time. no? 

Page 42.

"A precise definition of the power obtainable by these plants will be possible only after their construction and verification."

You assume a crude 50% value for C which is very optimistic, and not "prudent" as you claim on p. 43.

You do not know where the plants will be located, so you don't know whether the turbines will be operating at that very optimistic efficiency for 24 hours every day.

It is not rational to ignore the fact that there may be better renewable (or non-renewable) energy sources than wind in some locations.

You also need to adjust some figures and estimates to reflect the current price of oil.

For Leo Lazauskas:

About your careful and wise objections:

- C=0.5 (p. 43) is excessively optimistic and should be corrected, but "S = 2 s" is perhaps pessimistic and this could compensate the overvaluation of C. However, this overestimation and the fact that winds are irregular are corrected by the capacity factor (% of maximum power; see the next page). For traditional plants (e.g. Enercon E-126) the capacity factor is 0.45. For VertEolo plants, I have supposed values of 0.45, 0.50 and 0.55 for three different sizes of plants (VertEolo 1:1, 2:3 and 3:6). This is due to the fact that Enercon E-126 plants are "small" in comparison with VertEolo proposed plants and that wind strength and wind continuity increase in proportion to the height of the plants.

- There are numberless places that would be excellent for VertEolo plants (In particular, in the places near the sea). But even places where winds are weak at ground level could be very good. Have you ever been on the top of a skyscraper? Well, consider the figure 21 (p. 41): a skyscraper of 300 meters is high the half of a VertEolo 3:6!

- In some places non-renewable sources could be better (but non-renewable sources are causing harmful climatic changes) and in other places other renewable sources are better. This is discussed in the Introduction.

- The book has been written when oil price was high while now oil price is low. Current low oil price reduces the economic advantage (or increases the economic disadvantage) of using renewable sources, but an increment in the use of fossil fuels accelerates the climate changes and the related huge costs. Disregarding the costs caused by climate changes, the costs of energy production by traditional wind plants is competitive only if oil price is high, but I maintain that VertEolo plants should be economically competitive even with very low oil price.

For Susan Laird:

Please, see the image at page 141 (effects of sea-level rising on US if all the ice melted), to evaluate if this investment of time is good for you.

A Summary is given at p. 8:

83% of total world energy production for all purposes is, today, based on the use of non-renewable resources. This is becoming increasingly problematic, both in terms of the gradual depletion of the resources themselves, but even more so because of the progressive climate warming that, within a few decades, could lead to the complete destruction of large part of many of the world’s most important cities. A transition to massive use of renewable resources as soon as possible is, therefore, essential.

The use of wind power plants would potentially appear as the best possible solution but today’s plants have severe limitations. If, on one hand, we need to build plants that are as powerful as possible, costs grow exponentially, for the type of plant currently in use, in relation to the height (i.e., power) of the plants and so the construction of plants noticeably more powerful than those so far constructed, does not seem feasible.

This work proposes an entirely new type of plants, with a vertical axis of rotation, and with reduced costs, due to the method of construction and to the reduction in materials used.

In addition, the most interesting aspect is the possibility of constructing plants that are much more powerful than those existing at present with a linear increase of the costs/power ratio.

In fact, by building plants with an effective power 20 times greater than that of the most powerful current wind power plants built to date, about 68,000 plants would be sufficient to meet today’s world energy needs satisfied by non-renewable sources. Furthermore, in a future scenario with world population increased to 10 billion and average consumption per capita equal to that of the most industrialized countries (but excluding countries with high consumption of energy), the overall energy needs would be covered by about 165,000 plants. The building of these plants would not constitute a heavy economic burden but could, indeed, be amortized in less than two years.

Addition for Leo Lazauskas:

I have read (from: www.cyberiad.net/vawt.htm) the interesting paper:

The ring drive wind turbine: a revolution in large wind turbine design,  Brian K. Kirke, Sustainable Energy Centre, University of South Australia, 26 Sept. 2009.

All the problems underlined in this work are solved by VertEolo plants!

The book is a bit of a mess and needs better organisation.

I found it difficult to work out the solidity of the turbines, and many other important things like how you will guarantee self-starting.

If the solidity is high then efficiency will be lower, possibly as low as 20% or less.

It would help enormously if you had a nomenclature with a list of symbols at the start. That would allow easier comparisons with existing turbines and theory.

You also need to update your financial and other estimates to account for the increasing numbers of domestic (and other) rooftop solar installations. For example, rooftop solar now produces a substantial proportion of the power in Western Australia, and is increasing very rapidly in the USA and other places.

"All the problems underlined in this work are solved by VertEolo plants!"

Sorry, but you have solved nothing. You have a proposal (as does Kirke in his ring-drive paper), that is all. There is a huge gap between proposing

a turbine, or farms of VAWT, and getting them built on budget and to the desired specifications. :)

For Leo Lazauskas

- As regards "All the problems underlined in this work [ie Kirke's paper] are solved by VertEolo plants!". Alas, you are completely right: nothing is solved if a project is not carried out (but, clearly, I implied "if the project is carried out"). About the problems underlined by Kirke, in particular consider that current turbines with horizontal axis of rotation need: 1) large and heavy components with the related difficulties of transportation ("sizes are way over the legal limits on roads"); 2) enormous cranes; 3) huge loads on gearbox teeth; 4) difficulties for maintenance of the electric generator that is on the top of the tower, etc. These problems are overcome by VertEolo plants (if carried out!): 1) small and light components; 2) smaller cranes due to the top-down construction method; 3-4) electric generator on the ground level with larger mechanisms and without difficulties of access; etc.

- as regards "self-starting": Verteolo 1:1, 2:3 and 3:6 has sails each with a surface of 3360, 20160, and 60480 square meters, respectively, and the weight of the rotating parts (sails, ropes, etc.) is roughly 85, 450 and 1350 T, respectively. The sails move the rotating parts of Verteolo plants as the sails of a sailing ship move the ship. If, in VertEolo plants, we consider the width of the sails and the weight of the rotating parts and consider, in a sailing ship, the smaller ratio between sail surface / sailing ship weight, VertEolo plants need no self-starting mechanism much more than sailing ships do not need a self-starting mechanism.

- in 2012 the world energy produced by solar PV and solar thermal was 0.077% and 0.0039%, respectively. In 2014, solar energy has produced 18,460 MW in Italy (4° nation in the world) and 4,136 MW in Australia (9°). Solar energy is strongly subsidized (in Italy, for this we pay a surtax on electric bill) and is not at all economically competitive. About the future possibility of using massively solar energy, please consider the objections expressed in Green Illusions, Ozzie Zhener, 2012.

- You ask for the "solidity of turbines" but I do not understand what you mean and the relation between greater "solidity of turbines" and lower efficiency. If you mean the rotating parts (sails, ropes, etc.), they are both greatly flexible and resistant.

- Even if VertEolo plants have an efficiency in energy production 1/3 of what I have hypothesized, they would be strongly competitive in comparison with traditional plants.

- Yes, perhaps the book may be "a bit of a mess and needs better organisation" and "a nomenclature with a list of symbols at the start" could be useful. The collaboration of someone with a different point of view could be better.

Solidity is defined as Nc/R, where N = number of blades, c = chord length, and R = radius.

It is a very important parameter in VAWT research.

Thank you a lot for this explanation, but the hypothesized VertEolo plant is new type of VAWT without blades and a different type of formula should be used.