image © Dutch Windwheel

We can imagine a few potential objections – most obvious among them being, "What was that? I can't hear you over the sound of the turbine." But the wheel, planned for the port city of Rotterdam in southern Holland, would use a wind power technology with no moving parts, and should therefore be completely silent.

The electrostatic wind energy converter, developed in 2013 by a consortium of Dutch companies and academics, uses a combination of wind and water to generate power. Thin metal tubes across the turbine's surface contain electrodes and nozzles which throw out a fine spray of water droplets. These are naturally attracted to the positive eletrodes, but are displaced by the wind blowing through the structure. This increases their potential energy, and it is this energy that can then be harnessed as electricity. Here's a diagram:

image © CityMetric

image © CityMetric

image © CityMetric

Meanwhile, those rings around the turbine's edge will be used for all sorts of things. The outer one, which, according to the project's website, appears to be about 175m in diameter, will be filled with 40 "rotating cabins" on cables, to create a kind of very slow roller coaster ride, complete with (no sniggering at the back, there) an "interactive cinema trip through the history of the Dutch water management"......Continue Reading

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