The next breed of sustainable office towers could be designed with an eye toward wind as clean energy entrepreneurs continue to shrink the technology necessary to generate power from the zephyrs.

Wind power has been plagued by complaints of sleeplessness and vertigo from neighbors that live near the usually tall, loud towers. But companies are constantly developing new versions of the machines – especially with far smaller blades configured vertically, instead of horizontally – that little resemble the windmills so many turbines are modeled after. 

One such cleantech startup based in Cambridge has designed its own version of a vertical axis wind turbine (VAWT) that stands from 26 to 40 feet tall, with a 20-foot diameter, a far cry from the turbines in, say, Falmouth, where the towers rise more than 260 feet into the air and can be seen for miles around.

But instead of the turbines themselves being towers, Eastern Wind Power’s founders want to put their turbines on top of existing and new urban office towers.
Eastern Wind Power is headed by the husband-and-wife team of Jonathan Haar and Linda Mogelli Haar. In their past lives, the two worked in the urban planning and design worlds for about 30 years apiece. Finally, they decided it was time to do something radically different and “more hands-on,” Haar said. The two were working in downtown Boston and were dismayed at what she called the area’s lack of available renewable energy.

“You look up and see all these high-rise buildings, and the tops of the buildings are getting logarithmically more wind power,” than at the ground level, Haar offered. “The building itself creates more wind at the top of the building – wind splits along the face of building and increases in strength, so as it’s coming over the top you have higher wind speed than when it hits the building.”

Now, the company is ready to move to production and marketing of its Sky Farm 50 kilowatt (kW) VAWT in partnership with Siemens Industry. As example, two of the firm’s turbines has roughly the same energy output as a 20,000-square-foot rooftop solar array, said Eric Svahn, a senior associate with Gund Partnership architects of Cambridge brought in as a design consultant. Just one unit produces enough power to energize seven typical American homes, he added.

‘Truly Sustainable’

“It’s a truly sustainable concept to create energy generation systems that can be installed where the most energy is consumed, in densely populated, urban areas rather than creating a wind farm in green fields or on mountaintops or in the ocean where there’s no population,” or wasting power just to transport power, he said. The  Eastern  Wind company is still working on pricing the turbines. If you wanted one tomorrow, they would be completely handmade, according to Haar. However, she claims it is more competitive than solar power, and on a commercial rooftop the payback “would probably be five years or less.”

Beyond real estate applications, the firm hopes the VAWTs can be used in developing nations that lack the infrastructure to pump water, or in disaster areas where electricity is unavailable.

But the slimmed-down technology’s future in commercial real estate is far from clear. When it comes down to it, some industry executives were unconvinced the investment would be worth the trouble it takes to purchase and install the machines. It all comes down to how much energy the VAWTs can generate that will tip a landlord in the direction of passing on the idea or buying into it, said Peter Hamill, manager for New York-based Turner Construction Co.’s business unit in Boston.
Let’s look at the energy produced by a small installation of Eastern Wind Power’s turbines. Currently, a farm of about 10 to 12 turbines would power about one floor of an average office tower, with the potential for spillover to support the public spaces.
And that’s where the company’s biggest challenge lies.

“I think their struggle today is, even if you plaster the entire roof with these vertical shafts, you still don’t generate enough energy to make it worthwhile,” Hamill mused. “Maybe, if you can get some support from federal government [energy grant] programs, and if it’s strictly office and not a lab that’s drawing huge amount of energy. But I think what happens is you run out of room on the roof.”

Plus, if the roof being utilized is made of a composite material and not poured concrete as so many newer commercial roofs are to keep costs down, the project could incur costs of up to $5 to $8 a square-foot to reinforce, Hamill added. Multiply that by the 20,000 to 30,000 square feet of roof space a small farm would occupy, and that’s a potential added cost of anywhere between $100,000 and $240,000 on top of the cost of the VAWTs, according to Hamill’s estimations.

And if it’s all about one floor’s worth of power in an office building, “That’s not much is it, for the headache, if you think about the infrastructure investment to do that? It certainly sounds like it’s not much of a payback to make it worthwhile,” said William Gause, executive vice president for Boston-based real estate developer and investor Leggat McCall Properties.

Email: jcronin@thewarrengroup.com