Britain, Australia develop household wind

LONDON, July 5 (UPI) -- New designs for small wind turbines, like London's Ben Storan's, are cropping up as tax incentives and greenhouse gas concerns make wind more popular.

Storan's personal wind turbine design recently won first prize at the BSI Sustainability Design Awards 2007 in London. A Galway, Ireland, native, Storan is a student graduating with an MA in Industrial Design Engineering from the Royal College of Art in London. He's been working for the past year in conjunction with Imperial College London to design an affordable, personal, urban wind turbine.

His design uses vertical axis blade rotation, making it slower, allowing the turbine to capture more energy from turbulent air flow. The slower rotation also makes the turbine quieter than horizontal axis machines.

Other similarly-sized personal wind turbines have a generation capacity of 1 kilowatt at a wind speed of 12 meters per second but typically only operate at 40 percent capacity. Storan's lightweight design is expected to generate 1.2 kilowatts at the same speed.

In Australia, Perth households could soon be using the "Fremantle Doctor" to save energy and cut electricity bills.

The small turbine is being funded by the state government and developed by Graeme Attey. The Fremantle is a modular wind turbine system that sits on a roof and can generate power from the prevailing sea breeze or variable urban winds.