New Ideas in Wind Turbines

A friend writes:  Just came across this in a shared LinkedIn post … re: a wind turbine with blades shaped like a Nautilus shell. Yet another wind turbine idea … is it a good one? 

No, but I love stuff like this, though; if nothing else, it shows that people are thinking about the subject. 

The current approach harvests about 80% of the theoretically available wind energy, at extremely attractive costs.  The concept here requires added mass (equals costs) and it causes a problem that is central to the extraction of energy from moving fluids, e.g., air.  I.e., it doesn’t let the wind get out of its own way.  The reason that we can’t extract 100% of the energy from the wind is that this would mean slowing its velocity to zero.  But what happens if we did?  We’d have a mass of stopped air impeding the wind from coming along.  This is covered in the subject of the Betz limit—the degree to which we can slow a fluid without hampering the process.