Silent wind turbine is ultra-efficient (UK)

http://www.engineerlive.com/news/16981/silent-wind-turbine-is-ultraefficient.thtml

Stormblade Turbine Ltd is a London business start up company and it has designed an ultra-efficient wind turbine which works by accelerating the wind onto the blades and is therefore more efficient at low as well as high wind speeds.

Bird and bat friendly, the design does not have the mechanical noise often associated with commercial wind turbines and, as a result, is very silent in operation. It has fewer parts and higher generating capacity than other models and can theoretically, operate at any wind speed. The maximum wind speed will only be restricted by the materials used in construction.

Stormblade Turbine can convert up to 70 per cent of wind power into electricity, double the current average. Operational wind speed is expected to be 7mph to 120mph, double the current average range and the design is less noisy and wildlife friendly.

The propeller blades and all the moving parts are housed within the nacelle and therefore pose no danger to migrating birds or bats. Stormblade is also unique in that it produces less drag, operates at extreme wind speeds, has more power per rotation, requires less maintenance and is a third of the size of comparable industrial wind turbines.

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And ain't that grand!

This is most excellent news.

...is a honey trap for uninformed investors. It's like the early days of the tech bubble, when all you had to say was "Dot Com!" and the vulture capitalists would line up to pay for your Porsche. Small wind turbines have the same position in the investment food chain as the network processors I used to work on.

A normal turbine might might only capture power at 35% efficiency, but it does so with a cross-section of hundreds of square metres: at double the efficiency, these things would have to present half the same cross-section to hit the same output - say, a 70m diameter nacelle to generate 5MW. That's a lot of manufacturing resources for a turbine, never mind trying to hold the beast 150m in the air.

Or did I miss something? :shrug:

I'd love for these claims to be accurate, but logically it just doesn't make sense (at least to a layman with a couple of physics courses in his distant past) . . .